Wisest thing you can do in your life is to make your mind after something happens, not speak your mind, before it happens.Absolutely with ...
So... I beg to disagree.
Then I better specified what's the states of the server market for big companies which make use of Intel's Xeons.
I would like a source on your claim.I just said that is not easy to switch CPU vendors, and I put a know reason for it.
What else can I do to be more clear about it?!?
I skimmed it.. it's very high level written for a crowd who aren't familiar with the technology. I don't see any mention of custom instructions.No. Have you read it, or should I post just the quote from the specific part which I reported before?
This does make sense but also raises the obvious question...how long will it take for those companies to make sure ZEN is good enough for them to trust them in such products?Beyond it, each major group picks their own compute units, runs it, internally 'certifies' it and then those are the building blocks for whatever infrastructure (virtual private clouds, hosts of DB clusters which are completely different animal) group needs to use. If it hits in the budget and comes from major approved vendor (HP, Cisco, Dell, IBM, etc), no one would bat an eye on whether processor is AMD or Intel or whatever. Does the group says it works for them ('certification') ? does it fit in the budget? ok, lets try it
Things like AES acceleration is not unique to Intel.. a lot of vendors do that. I use it in my code, and as I said I work in the industry. I can't think of a single feature Intel provides that AMD doesn't provide either that would prevent us from switching. We don't deal with video compression, although I thought places like Youtube use a custom ASIC solution for this anyways.So, here is it that hot part:
Another way to make a chip faster is to add special circuits that only do one thing, but do it extremely quickly. Roughly 25 percent of the E5’s circuits are specialized for, among other tasks, compressing video and encrypting data. There are other special circuits on the E5, but Intel can’t talk about those because they’re created for its largest customers, the so-called Super 7: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. Those companies buy—and often assemble for themselves—Xeon-powered servers by the hundreds of thousands. If you buy an off-the-shelf Xeon server from Dell or HP, the Xeon inside will contain technology that’s off-limits to you. “We’ll integrate [a cloud customer’s] unique feature into the product, as long as it doesn’t make the die so much bigger that it becomes a cost burden for everyone else,” says Bryant. “When we ship it to Customer A, he’ll see it. Customer B has no idea that feature is there.”
It's kind of hard implementing hidden instructions used by say Amazon or Google without modifying the Linux kernel and dev toolchain for them. And then not disclose it due to GPL. I don't discount that they are there, but if they are not in the Linux source.. then they won't keep people from switching to Zen.The reported part was NOT talking about AES acceleration, which is common and a standard part of x86's ISA. Same think for video compression.
The specific part was talking about OTHER, HIDDEN, chip features which are enabled ONLY for SPECIFIC customers.
I am fully aware.. but this also means they are abandoning the continuing work and improvements done by the Linux community at large. And as someone who works in this field and who hangs out at dev conferences with those folks, I can tell you they frown on this idea.Well, it's very well known that at least Google has a proper, own Linux fork, which is internally maintained. Microsoft... is A BIT closed source.
The same thing can happen with other big vendors which have proper, internal infrastructures, which run their customized software.
The software can be even GPL, but if it's not distributed, the company cannot be forced to release its changes. Fortunately...
Absolutely... no. It's known that Intel has developed custom extensions to its CPUs for specific (BIG) partners, which are enabled only for such partners.
So, it's not as easy as it can be to switch to another CPU vendor.
I never stated the contrary. I've just reported the current situation, and that it's not that simple to switch CPU vendor.
BTW, Intel bought Altera, and has started shipping Xeons with integrated FPGAs...
Absolutely. If Zen can have competitive perf/watt some will switch. Why do people use Juniper when there is Cisco? There are always reasons. Besides AMD used to be a player in this field. Sun Microsystems invested in Opteron x86_64 in quite a big way back in the day.
I can tell you that some folks are just tired of having only one vendor. They want AMD if for anything but to be able to pit them against Intel and negotiate. Negotiations can then take any number of directions.
This is a big market too.. with fat margins. AMD doesn't need much of it to really boost their revenues.