[HN Gopher] Silicon innovation and custom ASICs at Amazon [pdf]
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Silicon innovation and custom ASICs at Amazon [pdf]
Author : mad44
Score : 87 points
Date : 2022-11-08 18:33 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mvdirona.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mvdirona.com)
| ancharm wrote:
| Is there any video of this posted somewhere?
| mk_stjames wrote:
| Whenever I see these modern cloud centers with racks and racks of
| GPU servers, or 64-core custom ARM CPU blade servers with
| terabytes of RAM... I can't help but wonder how many years it
| will be until I can just pick one rack up off Ebay for a few
| hundo and play with it, like I used to do with old 80s and 90s
| obsolete surplus. The way things are going... probably never.
| arbuge wrote:
| > The way things are going... probably never.
|
| Why not? What way are things going then?
| mk_stjames wrote:
| I simply do not see corporations selling off obsolete
| equipment in the ways I used to. It seems it has become
| cheaper and less of a burden to take EOL hardware and shred
| and sell for scrap than to sell off in a way that could ever
| wind up in a normal person's hands. I've seen this first hand
| recently- this very, very well known company had a new plant,
| with a whole warehouse of industrial equipment just old
| enough to be considered obsolete- literal highbays full of
| what were once very advanced robotics and specialized
| machines, perfectly useable for hobbyist engineers or even
| small startups, but too much of a burden to try and sell off
| for this company as that would take too long- the space was
| needed yesterday. So a service came that literally sawed
| things off the floor with grinders and torches and used
| excavators to load up railcars with anything metal.
| Electronics and cables were simply cut and piled in separate
| bins. It all literally went for scrap value, and in ways that
| it could never be repurposed.
| pyrolistical wrote:
| Sounds like an opportunity for a "scraping" company to make
| under market bids and resell equipment
| Arrath wrote:
| Disposal contracts often have clauses prohibiting
| activities like that.
| sn0wf1re wrote:
| It seems the hyperscalers are more in favour of shreding
| their hardware rather than putting it for sale on ebay. But
| I'm not sure if this holds true, I have seen old Google
| servers on /r/homelab.
| count wrote:
| They have data sanitization requirements that become
| difficult to manage at scale if they do anything else. Are
| you SURE there was no customer data stored in a
| recoverable-by-modern-physics manner on that machine you
| sold? Would you stake billions of dollars on it?
| dafelst wrote:
| Pretty much everything is encrypted at rest in the big
| datacenters these days
| monocasa wrote:
| Have you seen actual google servers, or their whiteboxed
| dell search appliances they sold for a while for other
| people to run in their own datacenters?
|
| These are some examples of the search appliances:
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/155187480321
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/284745813810
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I'm wondering the same. Maybe they're implying that things
| are going to get so bad that Amazon will just never be able
| to afford to replace them and they'll stick around like an
| IRS mainframe?
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Cloud hardware lasts longer than you think. There's a
| widespread misconception that it gets cycled out constantly,
| but the truth is, new hardware almost always supplements,
| rather than replaces, the old stuff. When I was at AWS we
| occasionally had to code workarounds for very old SKUs.
| jeffbee wrote:
| These things last 10+ years in the cloud so you'd need to be
| willing to buy something truly obsolete that's already been
| stripped for spare parts. Also, I imagine you'd have to be
| willing to cart off an entire rack, which won't be a standard
| rack but a weird shape, and then you'll need somewhere to plug
| it in, which won't be a plug as such but a point to which you'd
| need to wire 600VAC, or whatever that cloud operator was using.
| Finally, you're going to need some way to connect its weird
| network to your plain old network.
|
| Oh, and all the management features of the rack won't work
| because I am sure they would wipe their proprietary software
| before resale. Basically you're buying raw materials in an
| inconvenient package.
| xxpor wrote:
| You're more likely to be able to pick up an Outposts rack,
| which is at least designed to go into a more "normal"
| datacenter.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Unfortunately if you got a rack of Amazon's custom ARM servers
| you'd need access to their software to get it to boot. You need
| the device tree description of the hardware to get a Linux
| kernel booting and there's no standard for distributing or
| discovering those in ARM boards.
| monocasa wrote:
| It's deeper than that since they probably have hardware root
| of trust watching over boot. I'd be shocked if you could get
| it to boot at all without Amazon's signing keys.
| amelius wrote:
| What does "Hello World" look like in the silicon world these
| days? (Looking for a complete example containing everything
| necessary to go from code to tapeout, I know multiple answers are
| possible).
| lnsru wrote:
| The free asic program sponsored by big search engine:
| https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program However it might be
| much more complex than simple "hello world".
| reportingsjr wrote:
| This is a pretty recent thing, but for a beginner in the VLSI
| world I'd say this is a good "hello world":
| https://tinytapeout.com/
| zerohp wrote:
| I don't think it exists for advanced nodes like the ones Amazon
| is using.
|
| What does "Hello World" look like for a skyscraper?
| fragmede wrote:
| More of an MVP than "hello world", but a 6 story building
| that utilizes girders and concrete with an elevator, using
| materials and construction techniques that would scale to a
| 110+ story building.
| rob-olmos wrote:
| What's the next circle going to be? Mainframes become even more
| specialized & powerful, and then the cloud builds new more
| specialized silicon to match it?
| brooksbp wrote:
| > Where Have I Been? 2012 to 2022 around the world in a small
| boat. Worked full time at AWS. Only in North America 3 to 4
| times/year. Great to be back!
|
| WFH is over folks.
|
| Joking aside, that's awesome, and I hope some flexibility remains
| for all. Especially for those with little kids and two working
| parents.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The slides are interesting; I found the text commentary a good
| supplement: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2022/11/hpts-2022/
| jeffbee wrote:
| I like the concrete numbers in this deck. Over 20 million nitros
| installed, over 12GW power capacity. Gives us a chance to compare
| scale with the other bigs.
| nsteel wrote:
| Genuinely curious, why do you want to directly compare? Does
| this make them more attractive to work for?
| jeffbee wrote:
| I think it's interesting to see how big these clouds are in
| absolute terms because it gives us an idea of when the cloud
| has finished eating the world. We have global IT equipment
| energy consumption estimates, and we have scattered data
| points on cloud energy consumption. Looking at the two, you
| can gauge the overall process.
|
| Also as an investor I like to have a general idea of Amazon
| vs. Google in terms of overall size, to combine with their
| revenue figures, because that helps me understand how much of
| Google is being sold as GCP and how much is being used by
| Google itself.
| latchkey wrote:
| AWS uses 12,000MW of power.
| evancox100 wrote:
| For those wondering, the definition of HPTS: "High Performance
| Transactions System (HPTS) is a invitational conference held once
| every two years at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey
| California"
| pwarner wrote:
| The cloud is the new mainframe. The difference vs the old
| mainframe is it's so much more accessible to anyone. Barrier to
| entry to build one will be high, but to consume is very low. I'm
| trying to decide if lock in problem becomes bigger, but I think
| where people follow modern software engineering best practice,
| they can move if needed.
| js8 wrote:
| > The difference vs the old mainframe is it's so much more
| accessible to anyone.
|
| As someone who works on zSeries mainframes, I am not sure I
| agree. For developers, this is true, no doubt. But for
| organizations, in the cloud your data are locked away in ways
| they are not on the on-prem mainframe.
|
| Vendor lock-in seems to be similar - you use some middleware,
| you're locked in.
|
| With mainframe, there is more control over the infrastructure
| than in cloud. I see our management (I work for MF utilities
| vendor) constantly wrestle for control over our customer's
| environment that would be easily given in cloud (e.g.
| telemetry).
|
| What's also interesting (but slowly changing to the worse), the
| mainframe infrastructure (z/OS for instance) is quite open to
| custom modification, IMHO more than cloud (but it depends on
| type, IaaS/PaaS/SaaS).
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Vendor lock-in seems to be similar - you use some
| middleware, you're locked in.
|
| Is there that much difference between building your
| infrastructure in DynamoDB vs using IBM DB/2? To me, they
| seem to create similar levels of "lock in" and create an
| equal barrier to switching out to a new system... and if you
| want your data, you're going to dump it, reformat it, and
| start over.
|
| Or am I misunderstanding your point?
| ausudhz wrote:
| Without multi-year contacts.
|
| I think the only problem reside in applications that require
| longevity. Many apps nowadays get rewritten every now and then
| (especially front ends and Middleware)
|
| The problem is different for database and core systems.
| pwarner wrote:
| I think it still comes down to proper software engineering.
| If you have good interfaces, abstractions, and automated
| tests, you can move to new systems. I've seen teams struggle
| to move from DB version x to x+1, taking many many months,
| but it's because they have no idea if it works after they
| upgrade. On the flip side you have people like Snowflake who
| are building a database that runs across multiple clouds.
| From the outside it appears both portable and optimized for
| each platform. Thoughtful software engineering, with the
| right abstractions and test automation are a big deal...
| ausudhz wrote:
| Some databases and enterprise application have penalizing
| contract agreements that prevent cloud migrations from
| happening.
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