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by Agingcoder 1295 days ago
I'm not sure I understand the point of this article : in theory they don't depend on x86 only code, so they've switched to arm and it worked, as expected, and things are cheaper.

I'm happy that they've shrunk their bill, but I somehow expected some kind of 'unfortunately, things went wrong because of bizarre memory model issues causing difficult concurrency bugs'.

What am I missing?
2 comments
moloch-hai 1295 days ago
You can get those bugs when you are doing your own atomics, and your code relies on x86's relaxed memory semantics. It looks like their code is JS and Go, which buries that stuff. Services they use were already proven out on ARM. (Or, maybe, are not on ARM?)

Relaxed memory bus semantics imposes a pretty substantial performance cost. Depending on how they are billed, this might account for a big chunk of their lower cost. But probably not.

Their real problem is that they are firmly entrenched in proprietary Amazon services, so switching to another cloud would be very difficult. Amazon can raise prices 35% anytime, and what can they do?

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MuffinFlavored 1295 days ago
> in theory they don't depend on x86 only code, so they've switched to arm and it worked, as expected, and things are cheaper.

What's Intel's response to this as a company? I know that isn't mentioned in the article but... just curious

Does Intel have any ARM offering whatsoever?

Does AMD have any ARM offering?

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sofixa 1295 days ago
> What's Intel's response to this as a company?

They've lowered prices on their CPUs, and they have come out with so-called BIG.little designs (small eco low powered CPU cores for mundane stuff, and higher power ones for heavy lifting, in the same package with automatic switching - phones with ARM have had this for years, but it's new for x86 desktops/laptops).

Intel don't make ARM based chips, while AMD (who generally do more diverse things like special designs for consoles) have indicated they might. I'm not sure what competitive advantage they'd have, but Qualcomm need more ARM competition so anyone is welcome. The big blocker is TSMC capacity though.

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