This claim doesn't really hold up. The problem here is the vast majority of non-Apple laptops & desktops that are in use. THOSE will still all be x86 for the foreseeable future as ARM CPUs not made by Apple all have terrible per-core performance. Graviton2 compensates by just throwing 64 cores at the problem, but that's not going to do anything for your Electron-based text editor that struggles to use 2 CPU cores in the first place. Or for a typical webpage, which struggles to use more than a single CPU core.
That's going to matter when a company is spec'ing out workstations to buy, which are unlikely to have an Apple option on the table at all in the first place, and Amazon isn't going to sell you Graviton2 CPUs to put under your desk, either.
This _could_ be the start of a bigger focus on ARM, definitely, but to really make inroads into what devs use you'll need someone other than Apple to step up to the plate. Or for Apple to become vastly larger than they are in the desktop space. Otherwise we'll all just keep cross-compiling like we have been for the last decade of mobile app development.
I can't agree with the characterisation here that only Apple can make decent Arm cores. Graviton is apparently pretty closely based on an Arm Neoverse N1 CPU and the 64 vs 32 core point is comparing a hyperthreaded part vs one that isn't. Plus Graviton seems to be materially more cost effective.
However, there is a real challenge here and that's who has the capability and incentives to make laptop and desktop Arm cores. Microsoft probably, but hard to see many other firms doing so.
So a scenario where Apple gains a material lead in desktop and laptop performance over everyone else and grows market share as a result seems quite credible.
> Graviton is apparently pretty closely based on an Arm Neoverse N1 CPU and the 64 vs 32 core point is comparing a hyperthreaded part vs one that isn't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Graviton2 compensates by just throwing 64 cores at the problem, but that's not going to do anything for your Electron-based text editor that struggles to use 2 CPU cores in the first place. Or for a typical webpage, which struggles to use more than a single CPU core.
More cores will help your typical developer who's running 8+ apps at once, along with several browser tabs that are all running in separate processes.
Webapps are kinda like mobile phone apps. Only one tab is open and therefore only one process is actually running latency sensitive code. It's very unusual when a web app is using significant resources in the background since no rendering is taking place. Of course there are exceptions to the rule. One or two powerful cores are often all that's necessary.
Perhaps. But it's not at all uncommon for me to be running Chrome with devtools + Firefox + webpack + Sublime Text + xcode + a second webpack for react-native + an iphone simulator + Android Studio + flipper for debugging + Slack...
This definitely makes my computer run slowish (esp. Android Studio!). Of course I can shut things down and run fewer things at once, but it would definitely provide value to me not to have to.
I'm no expert on ARM vs x86 performance, and AWS's own language is careful to specify it's only significantly more cost-effective for certain workloads.
It'll be interesting to see how fast improvements are made in both Apple's and AWS's processors. That's another factor I see contributing to this: if Apple's pace of processor improvements continues as it has for iPhone and iPad, it'll be tougher year after year for competitors to stick with the status quo.
But otherwise as a developer-focused example the 32-core Epyc Rome compiles Build2 faster than the 64-core Graviton 2: https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2006047-PTS-EPYC2EC...
That's going to matter when a company is spec'ing out workstations to buy, which are unlikely to have an Apple option on the table at all in the first place, and Amazon isn't going to sell you Graviton2 CPUs to put under your desk, either.
This _could_ be the start of a bigger focus on ARM, definitely, but to really make inroads into what devs use you'll need someone other than Apple to step up to the plate. Or for Apple to become vastly larger than they are in the desktop space. Otherwise we'll all just keep cross-compiling like we have been for the last decade of mobile app development.