Amazon ARM: We Are Just Being Efficient. Absolutely.
September 17, 2020
The Register published “AWS Is Bursting with Pride for Its Arm CPU Cores – So Much It’s Put Them behind a Burstable Instance Type.” The main point is that certain AWS uses cases will be less expensive. Good. However, the most interesting facet of the write up is this comment from an individual who uses the handle “Anonymous Coward”; to wit:
ARM servers in the datacenter are not going to be a Thing until there is a sufficiently common systems architecture that important software can be portable between different vendors’ implementations without a massive conversion and optimization effort. Compare for example AWS ARM instances and the Fujitsu ARM compute nodes. The market today is a lot like the desktop computer world before the IBM PC (which, incidentally, is the direct ancestor of the Lintel server of today). Contrast the rapid adoption of GPUs for compute, which is facilitated enormously by Nvidia driving a standardized API across a broad range of cards. The worst case scenario for ARM servers is that the market remains an archipelago of incompatible implementations. The second worst is that AWS ARM instances become the de facto standard by sheer weight of market presence, and everybody else is left trying to “do what AWS does” by inspection, much like S3.
DarkCyber believes that Anonymous Coward has nailed the AWS tactic. Competitors have to be more like Amazon AWS. The long term objective, in DarkCyber’s opinion, is to implement an updated version of IBM’s “lock in tactics.” Pretty savvy for an online vendor of digital books.
Stephen E Arnold, September 17, 2020
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One Response to “Amazon ARM: We Are Just Being Efficient. Absolutely.”
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Very good information. Lucky me I found your website by chance (stumbleupon).
I’ve bookmarked it for later!