From the comments section of the article:

> Because there are so many power sensitive applications where ARMs are used, much has been invested in power minimization and management and they do very well. It’s easy to get remarkably better power consumption with an ARM part. But, in this particular case, our focus was more on server-side price/performance and, with that focus, our power consumption isn’t really materially better the alternatives.

Just a small reminder this is comparing a x86 on Intel 14nm+++++ and another one on TSMC 7nm. i.e the power efficiency would likely have absolutely nothing to do with the ISA in use.

To my uninformed understanding, power efficiency wasn’t really the design goal. If it’s AWS’s power bill, do we care as much (presuming sustainable energy)?

>If it’s AWS’s power bill, do we care as much (presuming sustainable energy)?

I care because it's an interesting question regarding future trends in technology. More broadly, people care about a lot more than just what has direct short term applications to their jobs.

Fair. Trouble is, we’re never going to get Graviton2 devices of our own outside of an AWS datacenter or device; the power profile is intellectually interesting, but not likely to ever enter the public sphere.

I'm not sure why Amazon won't try to recoup some of the investment by designing and marketing other boards / devices with this chip, or by just selling it in quantities to some manufacturers (think telecom, home entertainment, industrial equipment, etc).

Based upon my experience, I’d say it’s going to be profitable in its own right just by powering EC2 instances. The same argument could be said to apply to Apple’s ARM chips.

> the power profile is intellectually interesting, but not likely to ever enter the public sphere.

It does have an impact on operational cost, and cost is a very important factor.

If something is possible and economical then others will copy it in time.

Power and heat dissipation are a huge part of TCO for datacenters. I'm sure Amazon picked an appropriate point on the performance per watt curve.

Given that your cost is going to be correlated to AWS’s cost of goods sold, I’d argue of course we care.

I care what AWS charges me; I don’t have the energy to care what their underlying cost structure and its constituent parts looks like.

As I said in my comment, their underlying cost structure has a direct relationship to the cost you incur (at least in the long run with semi efficient markets). There’s a reason why commodity markets tend to revert towards variable cost.

> There’s a reason why commodity markets tend to revert towards variable cost.

Is that some theory of economical model ?

Or is that a way of saying the final price of a product varies greatly because the commodity part with the product is only a small percentage of the TCO / BOM ?

Indeed; we shouldn't care about AWS power efficiency but we also shouldn't assume that it's bad just because we can't see it.

I can think of exactly 0 circumstances where Amazon wouldn't pass on its power bill to its customers.

> presuming sustainable energy

Pretty big presumption.