Yeah, exactly. No argument that Intel keeps improving their processors. But at what cycle is the improvement so great, you are throwing money away by not replacing the hardware for the next generation.

It's also never quite as simple as looking at each generation as a discrete unit of upgradability.

Not only can the price:performance spread vary between generations, but this can change over time, particularly because the model availability within a generation broadens over time.

Add to this the dimension of low power versions of certain processor models (whose selection is therefore strictly a cost/longevity decision, presumably invisible to someone like a cloud end user), one can't safely generalize.

The other problem is that the CPU isn't even, necessarily, the majority of the purchase cost of a server.

The intention of my post was to look at the announcement dates as possible relation to the roll-out of new CPU capacity within AWS, which may tie into the retirement of older capacity and compute types. If we had that information, then you could answer some of the questions asked surrounding the deprecation schedules of HW in a DC the size of Amazon.

Specifically as it relates to the resources required to provide the same compute power for any given pool of instance capacity.

I know for a first-hand fact that AWS will not reveal its compute capacity, but in conversations with them, when we were actively monitoring the availability and continual use of all spot prices across every region, we had the data, according to them, to infer what their capacities were.

We had the data at the time, but not the interest/need, to be able to surmise ballpark compute capacity across all instance types in the spot pools - which is to say, what AWS' spare (i.e. non-fully reserved/dedicated) capacity was, and what the demand was for it. Additionally - we could have also bee publishing AWS' hourly revenues, dammit - I wish I would have thought of that - as people would have been interested in that data...

> If we had that information, then you could answer some of the questions asked surrounding the deprecation schedules of HW in a DC the size of Amazon.

But we still don't, so we still can't infer anything at all from the announcement schedule.

Moreover, assuming AWS is growing fast enough, new instance type announcements could be entirely decoupled from deprecations. Even with both sets of data, it may not tell us anything about overall replacement rate, without also knowing the overall growth rate.