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A comment on Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac. Parent comment

Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by qbasic_forever on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @12:00PM (#26957711)
Amazon's Graviton 2 is the M1 of the server world in my experience. It's faster, cheaper, and overall a better experience than any other instance type for most workloads. You have to get through a bit of a learning curve with multiarch or cross-compiling to ARM64 depending on what your codebase is like, but after that it's smooth sailing.

Azure and Google need to really step up and get some competitive (or even any) ARM instances--fast.

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by sneak on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @12:32PM (#26958203)
It's pretty crazy how good the Graviton processors are.

What's even more crazy is that you cannot buy them. Such price/perf is literally only available to rent from AWS.

I hope Oxide does something about this soon; it is a sort of dangerous situation to have such a competitive advantage only be available via rental from a single (large and anticompetitive) company.

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by wmf on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @06:30PM (#26962728)
Ampere Altra is actually faster than Graviton 2 and you can buy it. (But apparently the motherboard is >$5,000!?!) https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-servers.html
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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by AtlasBarfed on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @01:33PM (#26958978)
AMD will probably "arm" up quickly, NVidia is acquiring ARM proper, Qualcomm won't sit still.

Intel? Well, maybe 12 months after they catch up to AMD in x86.

AMD's chips I've seen are decently competitive with M1. If ARM is a not-too-bad microcode adaptation and ditching a whole lot of x86 silicon real estate, AMD might be able to come to market quickly.

Intel isn't just getting pantsed in x86 by AMD and process by TSMC, they are seeing their entire ISA getting challenged. Wow are they in trouble.

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by Hamuko on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @02:02PM (#26959290)
Isn't the ARM acquisition kinda stuck at the moment?
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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by uKGgZfqqNZtf7Za on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @04:11PM (#26960896)
It has to go through regulatory approval in the UK but this was to be expected. Jensen (Nvidia CEO) said he expected the acquisition to be complete by 2023.
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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by dagmx on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @03:37PM (#26960450)
It is, but nvidia don't need it necessarily to compete in the ARM space, since they already make Arm SOCs
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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by AtlasBarfed on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @06:28PM (#26962698)
arguably they would proceed on an ARM design with or without the formal company acquisition. It's too good of an opportunity.
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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by qbasic_forever on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @01:28PM (#26958920)
Yeah, I kinda wish Amazon would make a Graviton 2 powered laptop or dev machine. It would be really nice to develop directly on the ISA for the instance instead of cross-compiling. An Apple M1 of course works, but more ARM64 laptops need to be available. It's sad that it never got traction in the Windows hardware world.
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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by sneak on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @02:06PM (#26959333)
My concern is data centers, not development systems. One can always just ssh/x11/rdp/whatever into the Graviton machines.

There's also nothing wrong with the $999 M1 Air. Isn't the Surface also ARM? And most Chromebooks?

After you've already got the code, though, it's Amazon's way or the highway.

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by floatboth on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @09:16PM (#26964216)
Packet used to offer bare metal Ampere eMAGs (and old Cavium ThunderX's)… current Equinix Metal website doesn't seem to list any arm instances though :/

Apparently Oracle Cloud is going to offer both VMs and bare metal on Ampere Altras.

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by wmf on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @06:26PM (#26962680)
Future ARM Surface laptops will probably be faster than Graviton per-core but obviously with fewer cores.
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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by matwood on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @12:49PM (#26958424)
Agreed. I'm busy transitioning everything I can to Graviton2 for the $/perf savings.

For my Java services so far, no change. Aurora was a button click. ECS is the next thing to tackle.

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by sprite on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @01:02PM (#26958604)
I hope they add support for graviton on elastic beanstalk soon.
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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by Corrado on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @04:49AM (#26967173)
As the primary AWS guy in our company I'm pushing for all our developers to get M1 macs ASAP. When that happens we'll start building/testing on ARM systems and I'll transition all of our EC2 stuff over to Graviton processors. I've already moved several systems over to t4g instance types and we are saving $100's per month.

Bonus! This makes performance review time super easy; you've saved the company thousands of dollars this year, how about a raise?!

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by fomine3 on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @10:41PM (#26964860)
It's great EC2 instance for perf/cost, but how is it outperformed other x86 instances? Benchmark between Gravition2/EPYC(Zen1)/Xeon(Cascade Lake) shows that all CPUs are similar level. And now C5a EPYC(Zen3) is available, Xeon(Ice Lake) is sold.

For M1, it obviously outperformed competitive.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

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