> Curious what giants like Google do in these cases. I assume in their vast farms of servers there are post-2006 intel and/or post-2013 amd chips. As far as I

> Curious what giants like Google do in these cases. I assume in their vast farms of servers there are post-2006 intel and/or post-2013 amd chips. As far as I know Google mostly uses Xeons in their server farms, but also some POWER9 servers (for example cf. https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zaius-Google-and-Rackspaces-open-server-running-IBM-POWER9.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zai...) - many people say this is "some kind of Google's insurance against Intel/x86": > Do they get a special deal to look under the hood? It is well-known that the largest buyers of Xeons (plausible names are Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba and some others) have access to special versions of Xeons that have special features enabled that are disabled in the versions sold to the general public. One article giving hints into this direction is > http://semiaccurate.com/2016/11/17/intel-preferentially-offers-two-customers-skylake-xeon-cpus/ http://semiaccurate.com/2016/11/17/intel-preferentially-offe... One such feature that is talked about is having access to an FPGA (why did Intel buy Altera again) and it is well-known that Microsoft uses FPGAs for Bing: > https://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/10/17/the_moonshot_that_succeeded/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/10/17/the_moonshot_tha... > https://www.golem.de/news/microsoft-weil-cpus-zu-langsam-sind-muessen-fpgas-her-1705-127784.html https://www.golem.de/news/microsoft-weil-cpus-zu-langsam-sin... [German article] With this information I would bet that they have a special deal to look under the hood.