From the release of Amazon Graviton3, look at the core direction of cloud computing in 2022

2021 Amazon Cloud Technology re:Invent is over. Among dozens of releases, which product is the most important and has the greatest impact on the cloud computing industry?

There may be many people who vote for Amazon Graviton3. This is not only because the concept of “self-developed chips” has become a symbol of “hard core strength” and a popular topic among the public. It is also not only because chips represent the most basic capabilities of cloud services, but also because of the release of Amazon Graviton3. Locally affected the pattern of the entire industry and played a decisive role in many fields.

Amazon Graviton3 known information summary

Adam Selipsky, the new CEO of Amazon Cloud Technology, quoted analyst estimates on re:Invent: At present, cloud spending only accounts for 5% to 15% of the entire IT spending, and a large number of workloads will be migrated to the cloud in the future. At the same time, at previous cloud computing conferences, experts from the fields of meteorology and life sciences have also said that scientific research and more accurate modeling require huge computing power. Therefore, at the current stage, the industry's core demand for cloud computing is still computing power.

This means that the demand for cloud computing power in the entire industry is always growing, and the chip is always the core capability and the biggest trump card of cloud computing. The performance of the chip directly determines the future development of the cloud industry.

So how big is the Amazon Graviton3 released by Amazon Cloud Technology? Let's first summarize all the currently known parameters:

Amazon Graviton3 uses 5nm process, 64 cores, integrates 55 billion transistors, clocked at 2.6 Ghz, supports bfloat16 (a new digital format optimized for deep learning), PCIe 5.0. Compared with Amazon Graviton2, the Amazon Graviton3 processor supports up to 2 times the floating point performance for scientific computing, machine learning, and media encoding workloads, up to 2 times faster for encryption workloads, and up to 3 times for machine learning workloads. Times the performance.

The Amazon Graviton3 processor is also more energy efficient. Under the same performance, compared with the same type of x86-based instances, it can save up to 60% of energy consumption.

Compared with the current generation C6g instances supported by Amazon Graviton2 processors, Amazon C7g instances backed by Amazon Graviton3 processors can increase the performance of compute-intensive workloads by up to 25% and increase network bandwidth by 20%. C7g instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), allowing applications to communicate directly with network interface cards, providing lower and more consistent latency, and improving the performance of applications that require massively parallel processing (such as HPC and video encoding).

The Amazon C7g instance is also the first instance in the cloud to use the latest DDR5 memory. Compared with the Amazon Graviton2-based instance, it has increased the memory bandwidth by 50% to 300 GB/sec, thereby improving memory-intensive applications such as scientific computing. Application performance.

As far as overall performance is concerned, even if all its performance parameters have not been announced, it is still top-tier in the cloud computing industry. It is not too much to regard Amazon Graviton3 as a "hole card". It has the strength to push the industry forward.

Based on the Arm ecology, the long-term benefits of the cloud computing industry have been unified

So is it appropriate to regard Amazon Graviton3 as the representative of the entire cloud computing industry in the 2021 chip field? At least at this stage, it may be very appropriate, and data is the best answer.

According to Garnter statistics, in 2020, Amazon Cloud Technology will lead the world with a market share of 40.8%, ranking first in the world, and the second place will have less than half of Amazon Cloud Technology's market share. On July 30 this year, Amazon Cloud Technology released its Q2 financial report, showing that its quarterly revenue was US$14.8 billion, and its revenue in the past twelve months was US$52.7 billion, a growth rate of 37% and a growth rate of 9%.

Such a share and growth rate give Amazon Cloud Technology a great potential to form in the global cloud computing market, and the impact of its self-developed chip release is also quite huge. We can visualize this influence through its official cooperation cases:

Although the Amazon C7g instance is only available in preview, Nick Tornow, Twitter’s platform supervisor, has already expressed support: “We found that C7g instances based on Amazon Graviton3 processors can increase performance by 20%-80 compared to C6g instances based on Amazon Graviton2 processors. %, while also reducing tail latency by as much as 35%. We are very happy and look forward to using Amazon Graviton3 processor-based instances to get a better price/performance ratio."

You know, in 2020 Q2, Twitter's daily activity is as high as 186 million. There are many other customer cases displayed by Amazon Cloud Technology, all of which are heavyweights:

Pat Symonds, CTO of Formula One (F1) racing, said: "The Amazon Graviton3-based instance has excellent performance in terms of cost performance, and we look forward to it being the best choice for running all CFD workloads."

Mark Imbriaco, Senior Director of Engineering at Epic Games, said: "Our tests have shown that they (Amazon Graviton3) are even suitable for the most demanding and latency sensitive workloads, while providing excellent price/performance ratios, enhancing Fortnite and Any game experience based on a virtual engine."

More importantly, although it is still uncertain whether Amazon Graviton3 is based on Arm Neoverse N2 or V1, the performance is always guaranteed. N2 and V1 represent the highest single-chip performance and the highest single-thread performance, respectively. Arm's PPA for the N series The characteristic definition is "performance, power, and area have been given equal considerations". The definition of the V series is "breaking the performance limit". Either way is good. It is Arm after removing "can only make a fuss on power consumption." The turn of events.

And Arm can have this turnaround, one is inseparable from Apple's M1, and the other is mainly based on the Amazon Graviton series of Amazon Cloud Technology. M1 mainly guides the industry's attention to the status of the personal PC field, and Arm's strength in the enterprise service market is even before the personal PC. This is also a testament to the influence of the Amazon Graviton series.

Behind Amazon Graviton3, it actually reflects that Arm’s technological innovation at the chip level is the driving force behind the long-term development of cloud computing capabilities. This year’s 2021 Amazon Cloud Technology re:Invent, Amazon Cloud Technology has released Amazon IoT TwinMaker, Amazon IoT FleetWise, Amazon Private 5G, cloud edge-end integrated strategy, 5G strategy have been implemented, and Arm end cloud isomorphism, low power consumption, The characteristics of high efficiency and light weight fit the trend of the overall strategy of the cloud industry.

At the same time, the cost performance of the chip under the Arm architecture is higher than that of x86. The full deployment of Amazon C7g instances in the market next year will turn this judgment into a real business logic.

In addition to Amazon Cloud Technology, the cloud service examples of several major foreign cloud vendors are currently based on the x86 architecture, but there have been rumors earlier that they are considering self-developed chips based on the Arm architecture. Domestic cloud vendors have already embraced Arm, and the ecological construction is progressing rapidly.

The only hidden worry of Arm ecology comes from Nvidia's 40 billion acquisition, but doubts from regulatory agencies in the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States and other countries and regions have put the acquisition in a stagnant stage.

At least in the next few years, the prosperity of the Arm ecosystem is inevitable, and the cloud vendors represented by Amazon Cloud Technology in the ecosystem will also have the "bottom" worry-free.

Written at the end: power consumption has gradually become an important consideration

Whether chip performance can maintain rapid growth and whether it conforms to Moore's Law, this is naturally the focus of the chip industry. However, chip power consumption is becoming more and more important to the cloud computing industry and cannot be ignored.

From the perspective of short-term goals, power consumption directly affects costs. The lower the cost, the higher the profit, and the more suitable it is for large-scale public cloud vendors to intensively adopt. At the same time, research institutions continue to provide data. In the future, more than half of the data will be concentrated on the end side, and the requirements for power consumption of IoT devices will become more and more stringent.

From the perspective of long-term goals, the control of carbon emissions has become a global consensus. In the future, the requirements for chip power consumption and data center energy consumption will only be tightened, and will not be relaxed.

It can be said that Amazon Graviton3 based on the Arm architecture is in line with the short-term and long-term interests of the industry. At the beginning of 2022, the chips under the x86 architecture are likely to be updated, and the number of cores is likely to exceed 64. However, under the comprehensive consideration of the above dimensional factors, it is unknown whether it can compete with Amazon Graviton3.