mktmkr

Sure, on a handful of their machines. But they have a lot of private and dedicated hosts, too.

How are these relevant in a datacenter context? If you are the sole tenant of a machine then you will disable all the mitigations.

The historical context here is that AMD once had a monopoly inside Google's datacenters and pissed it away by shipping the horribly broken Barcelona followed by the not very broken, but also not very fast, Istanbul. This is a return to form for them, after a decade of poor form. The important thing for an operator like Google or Amazon is pricing power. As long as they can brandish a competing platform under the nose of Intel sales reps, they can get a better deal from Intel regardless of which they really prefer. You may have noted that a few years ago Google was showing a POWER platform at trade shows. That has the same purpose of putting Intel (and AMD) on notice that they have the capability to port their whole world to a different architecture if needed.

In the “what a time to be alive” category, this is essentially a repeat of Opteron.

Yeah but AMD should just beg Amazon to remove that instance type. It's hilariously slow. I don't know if Naples was just the beta of Rome or what but if you use it you won't like it.

"Well optimized MySQL" sounds a bit like having a really attractive liver cancer. Cloud services expand your options and it's worth pondering them. Don't ask what is the best MySQL, ask for a given amount of items I need to store and recall what is the best server OR SERVICE that could do it? MySQL on bare metal? On virtual machines? RDS? Cloud Spanner?

Do cloud providers increase your ability to choose scale-up instead of scale-out? Instead of your sharded and replicated MySQL that is almost inoperable and never seems to maintain consistency, would you be better served with one gigantic database? Sure it costs $13k/month to rent one from Google but it costs a quarter million to buy one from Dell. These are all aspects of the decision-making process.

OK but that's a comparison of a $3200 machine with 7x more CPU and more than double the memory of the $100/month virtual machine. The operating costs of the metal machine (electricity, repairs) and its lifetime are unstated.

Hard to take seriously and barely rises to the level necessary for rational debate. Is there a workload that is demonstrably 100x slower on AWS or GCE compared to the fully-loaded cost of bare metal?

No because fewer than 20% of households in Los Angeles have school-age children. That puts a ceiling on your worst case right there.

No, but to make sure we are talking about the same thing, a car share is a bit like renting a car by the hour. Uber is a computer-dispatched taxi service. Uber is not "car sharing". It is also not their other bullshit moniker "ride sharing"

Car shares are definitely not for driving to work but I fail to see why you can't use them to pick up your kids. Car sharing solves the problem where people can easily journey to work without a car, but they want one for other purposes like shopping.

I think you are overstating the case that the market will pass this saving through. In reality there is some market-clearing price for a dwelling without a parking space and there's nothing the developer can do to influence it. This is the same reason that it's actually not possible to "build affordable housing" as many people demand. Yes you can build the housing but there's nothing you can do about the price it then commands.

In SF as well, but the local government has shown itself unable to resist calls to later add parking entitlements to structures after they are built. For example all "live-work" developments are forbidden by law from participating in residential parking permit zones, but the city council has repeatedly established RPP zones on blocks where the sole residential buildings are all live-work.

1 shared car is shown to replace between 7 and 20 private cars in various deployments. Building new housing with dedicated car-share parking is a great way to go.

Yeah, except no. This is just one of those tropes that motorists use to force cities to subsidize them. Every study on this topic has conclusively shown that parking causes traffic. The construction of parking precedes the worsening of traffic, the amount of parking built is proportional to the amount of traffic observed, and the reverse process is also observed to correct the problem: removing parking alleviates traffic congestion. The case that parking causes traffic congestion is as strong as the case that smoking causes lung cancer.