Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ...
by _msw_ on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @04:00PM
(#23619467)
Disclosure: I work at AWS building cloud infrastructure
> The c5a.16xlarge is the same price as the m6g.16xlarge. No cost effective difference in that head-to-head.
c6g.16xlarge is more than 10% cheaper than m6g.16xlarge (and c5a.16xlarge). It also provides more EBS and network bandwidth, and provides 64 cores versus 32 cores with SMT.
https://ec2instances.info/?region=us-west-2&compare_on=true&...
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ...
by klelatti on Monday June 22, 2020 @05:47PM
(#23607201)
I actually agree that x86 will dominate the desktop for quite a while yet. I also agree that EPYC has materially better performance than the Graviton - Rome is very impressive.
Just can't agree though that only Apple has the ability to make desktop / server Arm parts that don't have 'terrible' per core performance. The real issue is who has the economic incentive to build competitive desktop parts - I don't see anyone who would see it as worthwhile.
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ...
by imtringued on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @07:03AM
(#23612341)
That's the fundamental problem with the Apple monopoly. I would be perfectly happy if I could use an non-Apple laptop with an outdated Apple SoC. However, since only Apple gets access to their SoCs everyone is worse off.
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ...
by BurritoAlPastor on Monday June 22, 2020 @08:05PM
(#23608454)
c5a and m6g instances are the same price, but m6gs have twice as much memory. c6g instances are a better point of comparison for c5a – same vCPU count still, same memory, marginally better network at 8xlarge and up, and about 88% of the price.
How does hyperthreading change the story here? The 32-core CPU is the one that had hyperthreading while the 64-core one didn't. Hypthreading is widely regarded as being around +20% performance for multithreading-friendly workloads. Either way, the per-core performance of the 32-core x86 CPU is nearly 2x that of the 64-core ARM one. That's not a good look for being desktop-viable.
Especially when the 32-core x86 cpu also comes in a 64-core variant. And then a 2P 64-core variant even. You can have double the CPU cores that are each 2x faster than the Graviton 2 CPU cores.
Which gets back to only Apple has managed to get ARM to have good per-core performance so far.
> Plus Graviton seems to be materially more cost effective.
The c5a.16xlarge is the same price as the m6g.16xlarge. No cost effective difference in that head-to-head.