Arch column doesn't differentiate between x86-64 and ARM64

[blckct]

While technically the A1 instances are 64-bit I think it could be a good idea to mark them as something different than the x86-64 instances. The current source returns the architecture for both as "64-bit" unfortunately.

[selivan]

Totally support this, I need to filter out ARM instances. Also this may be done by adding separate column "Arch type". @powdahound , any chance for this issue?

[powdahound]

I don't have the bandwidth to commit to adding this at the moment, but it shouldn't be too hard.

Are there other arm64 instance types yet? Maybe this is rare enough that the families could be hardcoded. And the existing "Arch" colum could be used with a value of "ARM 64-bit"?

[selivan]

@powdahound "ARM 64-bit" should do it, but then x86-64 instances should also have other arch name like "x86 64-bit". The idea is to filter out only required architecture, if one of them contains name of another("64-bit") it won't work: "64-bit" will filter both.

Though I prefer official architecture names, like "x86-64" and "AArch64".

Are there other arm64 instance types yet?

Not that I know of.

BTW thanks for the ec2instances.info, it's really useful.

[blckct]

@powdahound @selivan There are. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-graviton2-powered-general-purpose-compute-optimized-memory-optimized-ec2-instances/

They are not generally available but the m6g instances are already displayed on ec2instances.info. As an alternative to hardcoding families matching on graviton/graviton2 processor might work.

[selivan]

@blckct Graviton2 is still AArch64. And the idea is to filter only instances with x86-64 architecture(or AArch64) and now you can't do that. You can filter only Intel processors, but Amazon can add x86-64 AMD processors someday. And some instances have "Variable" processor. Separate field with exact processor architecture would be much better.

[blckct]

@selivan There are AMD 64-bit CPUs already in the offer. What I was saying is that instead of hardcoding the ARM families we can instead mark instances that have the graviton CPU as ARM. And I know separate field might be useful, that's why I opened this issue.

[selivan]

@blckct I agree, should be a separate field for the processor name(Intel Xeon XXX, AMD YYY, Graviton ZZZ) and for the processor architecture type(x86-64, ARM).

[cristim]

We do have a field for the Physical CPU, it's just hidden by default.

[selivan]

@cristim Column "Physical Processor" allows to filter only ARM processors, because they all are Graviton, but it does not allow to filter only x86-64 instances, because some are Intel and some are AMD.

[jpluscplusm]

Just a ping to mention that this is definitely still an issue, and likely to increase in annoyingness for a few reasons:

• The new Apple ARM (M1) hardware is going to make folks more aware that they need to match local and cloud resources, especially with container-image selection
• AWS now has entire instance classes (t4) which appear similar to previous classes (t3), but are only available in ARM (t4g) flavours

[raffraffraff]

I hate doing the "me too" thing, but I want to add context: this is a huge pain in the butt because of the additional issue that columns do not support negative filtering (eg "-Graviton") or regex. For example, I want to list all machines in a price range with at least 8GB of memory, I have to 'mentally' grep -v the Graviton2 instances.

Edit: So I found out via another issue that search supports |, so I can get around this by searching for "Intel|AMD". (I never tried this before because the column search only support simple text filtering)

[EverettBerry]

@raffraffraff @jpluscplusm @selivan @cristim @powdahound @blckct Hey folks, wanted to bring your attention to a few items with the goal of closing this issue.

1. I just merged Regex support for column filters, #674, which means you can now do things like ^((?!Graviton).)*$ to exclude all ARM instances. You can also do Intel|AMD|Apple to achieve the same result. This change will be live within 24 hours as our cache clears.
2. These are filters for the Phyiscal Processor column. The Arch column does NOT contain any information that will tell you about the type of CPU. Only 32 or 64 bit, which does seem increasingly passe.
3. I've updated the documentation to reflect this functionality https://handbook.vantage.sh/tools/instances/#regex-support

Please let me know if these items satisfy the feature requests here and we can close this out!

[ajoga]

Please let me know if these items satisfy the feature requests here and we can close this out!

Hey, thank you for this. However I came to Github because I had the same intuition as OP to filter out the ARM machines. I was not expecting Regex could be an option.

So in terms of goals it satisfies the feature requests, yes, but UX-wise it's not there yet

[selivan]

@EverettBerry thank you, that works 👍 . Would be convenient for other users to see some indication in the interface about using regexp in filters.