A lot of the comments and the Article seems to be missing some context.
On Graviton -
People vastly under estimated the scale of Hyper scaler. ( They are called Hyper Scaler for a reason ) and over estimated the cost Amazon actually put / required / invested into G2 ( Graviton 2).
Over 50% of Intel Data Center Group revenue are from HyperScaler. Some estimate put Amazon at 50% of all HyperScaler. That is 25% of Intel Data Center Group revenue are from Amazon alone. Or ~$7B per year. To put this into perspective, AMD, a company that does R&D on CPU, GPU, in multiple different market segment make less revenue in 2019 ( $6.7B ) than Amazon spend with Intel.
It is important to note Data Centre Spends continue to grows with no end in sight. Amazon estimated there are less than 10% of Enterprise IT workloads are currently on Cloud. And IT in Enterprise is growing as well. Which means there is a double multiplier.
G2 is an ARM custom N1 Design. Basically with less core and L2 cache to reduce die size and cost. The N1 is TSMC blueprint design ready. So while you cant really buy "Graviton 2", in theory you can get a replica fabbed from TSMC if you have the money. ( On the assumption Amazon did not put any custom IP into it ) And That means G2 isn't a billion dollar project. Even if it cost Amazon $200M, if Amazon only make 1M G2 over its life time, that is still only $200 per unit. Or less than $300 including Wafer price. Compare to the cost of buying the highest core count from from Intel. The cost is nothing.
Also reminder Amazon dont sell chips. And the biggest recurring cost to AWS other than engineers is actually power. And in terms of workload per watts, G2 currently has huge lead in many areas. And as I have noted in another reply, Amazon intends to move all of its services and SaaS running on G2. The energy efficiency gain with G2 and future Graviton at AWS scale would be additional margin or advantage.
On the Article and SMT / HyperThread -
I guess the headline "Intel vs ARM" is a little clickbaity and may not be an accurate description. Which lead to comments thinking it is a technical comparison between the two. But I dont think the article intends it to be that way. It also assumes you are familiar with Cloud Vendors and pricing. Which means you knew what vCPU are, instances are priced per vCPU and ARM instances with the same vCPU prices are always cheaper.
And that means from a Cloud deployment and usage perspective, whether the Intel Core does SMT / Hyperthread, or can reached up to 6GHz is irrelevant. Since it is not designed to test those. You are paying by vCPU and you have a specific type of workload. You could buy a 64 vCPU Intel instances, run a maximum 32 Thread test on it and compared to a 32 vCPU G2 instances. But you will be paying more than double the price. IBM POWER9 also has SMT4 or 4 Threads per Core. No one disable SMT just to test its Single Core performance.
And as noted in the first reply, the test is clearly Memory Bound, in which G2 has an advantage of having 2 more Memory Channels along with higher Memory Speed support. It would be much better to see how it compares to the recently announced AMD Zen 2 instances also comes with 8 Channel memory.
It clearly performs and scales a lot better than the Intel CPUs (no doubt also benefiting from the increased memory bandwidth) and at high core counts is very close to the Graviton2.
Furthermore, I agree that the “investment costs” for Amazon are almost minute, they might have already earned it back.
On Graviton -
People vastly under estimated the scale of Hyper scaler. ( They are called Hyper Scaler for a reason ) and over estimated the cost Amazon actually put / required / invested into G2 ( Graviton 2).
Over 50% of Intel Data Center Group revenue are from HyperScaler. Some estimate put Amazon at 50% of all HyperScaler. That is 25% of Intel Data Center Group revenue are from Amazon alone. Or ~$7B per year. To put this into perspective, AMD, a company that does R&D on CPU, GPU, in multiple different market segment make less revenue in 2019 ( $6.7B ) than Amazon spend with Intel.
It is important to note Data Centre Spends continue to grows with no end in sight. Amazon estimated there are less than 10% of Enterprise IT workloads are currently on Cloud. And IT in Enterprise is growing as well. Which means there is a double multiplier.
G2 is an ARM custom N1 Design. Basically with less core and L2 cache to reduce die size and cost. The N1 is TSMC blueprint design ready. So while you cant really buy "Graviton 2", in theory you can get a replica fabbed from TSMC if you have the money. ( On the assumption Amazon did not put any custom IP into it ) And That means G2 isn't a billion dollar project. Even if it cost Amazon $200M, if Amazon only make 1M G2 over its life time, that is still only $200 per unit. Or less than $300 including Wafer price. Compare to the cost of buying the highest core count from from Intel. The cost is nothing.
Also reminder Amazon dont sell chips. And the biggest recurring cost to AWS other than engineers is actually power. And in terms of workload per watts, G2 currently has huge lead in many areas. And as I have noted in another reply, Amazon intends to move all of its services and SaaS running on G2. The energy efficiency gain with G2 and future Graviton at AWS scale would be additional margin or advantage.
On the Article and SMT / HyperThread -
I guess the headline "Intel vs ARM" is a little clickbaity and may not be an accurate description. Which lead to comments thinking it is a technical comparison between the two. But I dont think the article intends it to be that way. It also assumes you are familiar with Cloud Vendors and pricing. Which means you knew what vCPU are, instances are priced per vCPU and ARM instances with the same vCPU prices are always cheaper.
And that means from a Cloud deployment and usage perspective, whether the Intel Core does SMT / Hyperthread, or can reached up to 6GHz is irrelevant. Since it is not designed to test those. You are paying by vCPU and you have a specific type of workload. You could buy a 64 vCPU Intel instances, run a maximum 32 Thread test on it and compared to a 32 vCPU G2 instances. But you will be paying more than double the price. IBM POWER9 also has SMT4 or 4 Threads per Core. No one disable SMT just to test its Single Core performance.
And as noted in the first reply, the test is clearly Memory Bound, in which G2 has an advantage of having 2 more Memory Channels along with higher Memory Speed support. It would be much better to see how it compares to the recently announced AMD Zen 2 instances also comes with 8 Channel memory.