[llm_nerd]

In Amazon's Graviton 5 PR they note that over half of all new compute capacity added to AWS over the past three years has been Graviton-based. That's an amazing stat.

It really is incredible how ARM basically commoditized processors (in a good way).

[Octoth0rpe]

Inversely, I think it's siloed things in somewhat unhealthy ways. We now have a number of vendors that sell/rent you machines that are not generally purchasable. I don't think we've seen too many negative consequences yet, but if things continue in this direction then choosing a cloud provider for a high performance application (eg, something you'll want to compile to machine code and is therefore architecture specific in some way as opposed to a python flask app or something), one may have to make decisions that lock one into a particular cloud vendor. Or at least, it will further increase the cost of changing vendors if you have to significantly tweak your application for some oddities between diff arm implementations at different hosting providers, etc.

I would much rather see some kind of mandatory open market sale of all cpu lines so that in theory you can run graviton procs in rackspace, apple m5 servers in azure, etc.

[sgerenser]

Graviton CPUs are just Neoverse cores (V3 in this case). While it’s true that you can’t just buy a box with the same cores, the cores are basically the same as what you’ll get on a Google or Azure cloud instance (eventually… the latter two have yet to make available anything with Neoverse V3 yet).

[jsheard]

Strangely the first-generation Graviton chips have actually shown up in MikroTik hardware that you can just buy. Amazon must be selling off their stock to third parties once it's phased out of use at AWS, but I doubt they'll ever sell the stuff they're still using.

[aseipp]

MikroTik is one of the few public organizations who can still get chips from Annapurna Labs after their acquisition by AWS, it seems. Many of their offerings are still using Annapurna parts, and Annapurna still appears as a distinct brand in AWS marketing for its custom silicon, even. I wonder what the specifics of that relationship are.

(Side note but the original Graviton1 was just 16x Cortex-A72 cores, nothing particularly special about it. Actually, all of the Graviton series are just standard ARM cores. But beyond that the SKU they use is indeed the same one AWS uses.)

[re-thc]

> over half of all new compute capacity added to AWS over the past three years has been Graviton-based. That's an amazing stat.

Yes and maybe no. They do "cheat" in that internal / managed services often use Graviton where possible. It works out cheaper without the Intel / AMD "tax".