<story><title>New EC2 Instance Types of re:Invent 2021</title><url>https://aws-native.com/new-ec2-instance-types-of-reinvent-2021</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>twoodfin</author><text>I’ve been curious for a while: Has anyone done the envelope math to estimate how much of the Graviton price advantage offered by AWS is a reflection of true price&amp;#x2F;performance vs. AWS taking a short term margin hit to encourage growth of a CPU platform they control?</text></item><item><author>hectormalot</author><text>The specific designation of Intel with the ‘i’ suffix is interesting. I’m surprised how fast this went from “everything is Intel” to “only take intel if you need something like SAP”.&lt;p&gt;I remember the first AMD instances a few years back and the 10% price&amp;#x2F;performance was nice, but at the same time didn’t feel like it would convince enterprise users to switch. Now with Graviton2&amp;amp;3, they’re apparently at 30-40% advantage and any big user would be crazy not to explore moving workloads over.&lt;p&gt;I expect the Intel-AWS negotiations today are _very_ different vs 5 years ago. This new naming is just one of many signals of a further downhill trend to Intel, and it’s likely to gain momentum in the next few years as the experience and ecosystem around ARM grows.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>&amp;gt; by AWS is a reflection of true price&amp;#x2F;performance&lt;p&gt;I assume you mean cost &amp;#x2F; performance as in Cost to amazon and not price as in price paid by consumers? Because Graviton is both faster and cheaper per vCPU. ( Amazon unit for a single thread )&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;AWS taking a short term margin hit&lt;p&gt;It is hard because even if you can reliably extrapolate the cost of Graviton chip by wafer price. You will never know how they put the R&amp;amp;D into accounting. Do you have NRE cost in every single one those chips? ( which is what most people assume but not necessarily true ) Or do you move the whole R&amp;amp;D of Graviton into whole AWS R&amp;amp;D budget? And then you will have to calculate the power usage per workload to work out the power saving which gives you the TCO. Since 30%+ of Operating cost are going to energy usage. Being power efficient is also extremely important at the scale of AWS.&lt;p&gt;All in all I do not believe that Amazon is takin a short term margin hit ( and I dont understand where this narrative came from ), it is cheaper to produce, it uses less energy, and Amazon is pricing it as such, slightly cheaper than Intel and AMD&amp;#x27;s counterpart. Just like they did with the first generation of ARM. Graviton actually being faster per core just happens to be a bonus.&lt;p&gt;One has to remember. Moving to ARM &amp;#x2F; Graviton instances isn&amp;#x27;t free. You have to do your own testing and benchmarks to make sure it is indeed faster for your Apps. And that isn&amp;#x27;t always the case. You also have to make sure every part of your stack compile and works 100% on ARM. It just happens the cost saving is so gigantic lots of companies are spending time to move, which create a positive feedback loop in both open source and proprietary software to move towards ARM.</text></comment>
<story><title>New EC2 Instance Types of re:Invent 2021</title><url>https://aws-native.com/new-ec2-instance-types-of-reinvent-2021</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>twoodfin</author><text>I’ve been curious for a while: Has anyone done the envelope math to estimate how much of the Graviton price advantage offered by AWS is a reflection of true price&amp;#x2F;performance vs. AWS taking a short term margin hit to encourage growth of a CPU platform they control?</text></item><item><author>hectormalot</author><text>The specific designation of Intel with the ‘i’ suffix is interesting. I’m surprised how fast this went from “everything is Intel” to “only take intel if you need something like SAP”.&lt;p&gt;I remember the first AMD instances a few years back and the 10% price&amp;#x2F;performance was nice, but at the same time didn’t feel like it would convince enterprise users to switch. Now with Graviton2&amp;amp;3, they’re apparently at 30-40% advantage and any big user would be crazy not to explore moving workloads over.&lt;p&gt;I expect the Intel-AWS negotiations today are _very_ different vs 5 years ago. This new naming is just one of many signals of a further downhill trend to Intel, and it’s likely to gain momentum in the next few years as the experience and ecosystem around ARM grows.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lizthegrey</author><text>Intel charges a much larger markup per chip than AWS can get from their own silicon + licensing ARM IP; the power consumption of Intel chips is also terrible (it&amp;#x27;s been cited that it&amp;#x27;s 60% lower power consumption for c7g instances compared to c6i instances, for instance, in the latest reinvent talk...) -- and power is what predominates operating cost day to day once the chip is fabbed&amp;#x2F;installed.</text></comment>