Regarding alibaba ARM cloud, I am eagerly waiting for AMD Bergamo zen4c 128 cores tailored for cloud. We are also seeing efficiency cores from intel. This will very likely make it to cloud customers. So, we need to wait on these cores to come and compete and then, only then see how ARM does against a legitimate competition in the area that ARM server processor designers are targeting.
Also, a comment about ARM ISA from victor peng… AMD Replay – Tech Summit 2022: The Age of AI Scaling | Rosenblatt Securities Events @ 28:40 . I am transcribing it for everyone here so that the ARM hype is in check.
Mosesmann – I used to cover ARM back when they were public. I recall an executive at ARM had said that all this being equal if we had an ARM processor at the same process node because of the efficiency of the architecture we can use 1/3 of the transistors than an x86 processor would use, I dont’t know if you can comment on that because it is more like an x86 question and not your area historically but …
Peng – yeah… well hans you know what i would say is okay, I guess… you know I started my career as a microprocessor designer . My first program was a VAX mini digital computer so that shows you my age () , I have done VAXs, I have done MIPS (VP of engineering), SGI, We have done multiple generations of ARM now at xilinx we do ARM SOCs and now (I am) with a company that is x86. So what I would say is that, that is technically not accurate (He is laughing a bit here). Modern architectures have a lot of commonality, I am not saying there aren’t some differences with these instructions and architectures but you know that claim of factors like that is simply not true right… When you target certain things like the ultimate in single threaded performance that leads you to certain architectural choices. If you are not targeting the ultimate in single threaded performance and you are targeting something else like say a mobile handsets or something where you care a lot about power you have different architectural choices. I think there is a lot more about architecture and implementation choices as opposed to what is inherent in the instruction set architecture… I have done a lot of architecture in my time but I think that is tremendously exaggerated.
Jim Keller had something similar to say about ARM vs x86. His talk is available now in YouTube
RISC vs CISC: Instruction sets don’t matter | Jim Keller and Lex Fridman
Jim Keller: Arm vs x86 vs RISC-V – Does it Matter?
All I will say is ARM is making incursions, but we do not know how much of it is due to the goof up that intel has done. It could very well be that new server entrants will learn some old lessons from intel. Having your own fab is a different thing altogether. Another factor coming in is geopolitics… so… we can only observe how ARM progresses as of now and set our expectations at the right level. Because it is only now in 2023 that AMD and Intel (may be) will give out cores targetting specifically for cloud customers.
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