News Intel's Epyc Potential Loss: Google Servers May Switch to AMD

[Admin]

A new report said that Google has been building its own servers with AMD Epyc CPUs as it considers a switch to AMD over Intel.

Intel's Epyc Potential Loss: Google Servers May Switch to AMD : Read more

 

[bigdragon]

I think this is a smart move. In the post-Meltdown and Spectre world, hardware diversity is looking like an appealing option. Having everything be the same architecture does help keep costs down, but bites you hard when major, multi-generational vulnerabilities come out.

 

[bit_user]

Even Android isn’t truly architecture-agnostic, as a good portion of the platform’s applications are written in native code for Arm. This is also why Intel’s Atom CPUs would drain smartphone batteries quickly when people would played games (normally written with native code, as opposed to being written in Java) on their Intel-powered devices.

Android is ISA-agnostic, but apps can have natively-compiled portions. I don't know how common that is, but it's reasonable to expect that the popular game engines have optimized, native code for both ARM and x86.

I honestly doubt that has much to do with why games are such power-hogs, though. The issue is really that smart phones spend most of their time idling, and when you really crank up the CPU and especially the GPU, it just depletes battery power very quickly.