The History of x86, ARM, & Amazon's Graviton Processor
Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb and Former SRE Leader at Google
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The History of x86, ARM, & Amazon's Graviton Processor(August 18, 2022)
Liz Fong-Jones
Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb and Former SRE Leader at Google
Interview Transcript
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What is it about GCP that is unique compared to the other cloud providers?
Taking off my Honeycomb hat and putting on my former GCP employee hat, there are things that GCP does better than the competition. GCP offers you the capability of using Google's world class networking set up and capabilities. Google has lower latency and higher throughput than Amazon or Microsoft. Google pioneered and innovated TensorFlow TPUs, and there are also ideological reasons. Walmart refuse to do business with companies hosted on AWS, which subsidizes their biggest competitor.
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What's your forecast of ARM’s market share in the next five to 10 years?
I've seen analyst reports claiming 15% of Amazon's new build chips are ARM. I'm not in a position to substantiate or deny that, but it would be completely reasonable in the next five years for a majority of new data center chip deliveries to be ARM rather than X86. If we're sitting at 15% to 20% today, I don't see a reason why that's not 50% of new deliveries in five years. There is a substantial install base of X86 that may not be going away because people have their legacy payroll apps which need to run on an X86.
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If Graviton has a 20% to 35% price advantage, why doesn't everyone switch?
I wanted to correct you on something. It's no longer a 20% or 30% difference; it's more like 50% to 60%. If you compare the C6I Intel processor on AWS to the latest C7G ARM processor instance type, it's roughly a 50% to 60% price performance increase. Intel is already optimized as hard as they can, whereas it's just the beginning of the game for Graviton. We have C5 Intel powered instances and C6G instances that are 20% to 30% better price performance. Intel is not going to let itself get eclipsed, so they deliver the C6I which is 15% to 20% better than the C5.
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