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From the article: "Amazon licensed much of the technology from ARM, the company that provides the basic technology for most smartphone chips. It made the chip t
by ChuckMcM 8y ago
From the article: "Amazon licensed much of the technology from ARM, the company that provides the basic technology for most smartphone chips. It made the chip through TSMC, a Taiwanese company."
Amazon became an ARM architecture licensee and had their variant manufactured for them by TSMC.
I find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree.
That said, the interesting thing about this article is that given Intel's margins, a company like Amazon feels they can take on the huge cost of integrating a CPU, support chips, and related components to achieve $/CPU-OP margins that are better than letting Intel or AMD eat all of that design and validation expense.
This sort of move by Amazon and AMD's move to aggressively price the EPYC server chips, really puts a tremendous amount of pressure on Intel.
- projektfu 8y agoI think it's fair to call it home grown, like in house, but to say it threatens Intel is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. Seems unlikely. Amazon also has to be careful now not to run afoul of anyone's IP as they can't farm out that responsibility to other providers.
- hbosch 8y ago> but to say it threatens Intel is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. The implication is that Amazon is everyone's datacenter.
- Despegar 8y agoWell I'd say it's certainly a big risk to Intel. For one, a lot of Intel customers are going in-house with chip design. Apple on its own might not hurt much, but add a few more like Amazon or Google, and things can really unravel. If you're an integrated chip designer and you lose volume, you're in for a lot of pain. The thing that defines Amazon in recent years is their desire to make everything a third party service (AWS, Fulfillment, etc) and they may in fact do that for their own chips. So while Apple may never sell their chips to anyone, Amazon may decide to enter the merchant chip business (if they decide it's not a competitive advantage). Maybe they wouldn't sell it to Microsoft or Google, but certainly other companies that they don't compete with that operate their own servers (Facebook). And then Intel would really be losing volume.
- stcredzero 8y agoThe thing that defines Amazon in recent years is their desire to make everything a third party service (AWS, Fulfillment, etc) and they may in fact do that for their own chips. AWS was Amazon monetizing its own infrastructure. Maybe they're thinking of monetizing AWS's infrastructure? Instead of being in the gold rush, sell the pickaxes and backpacks in a general store. Then, when people realize there's a lot of money in those stores, start selling store shelves and offer wholesale logistics.
- justicezyx 8y ago> AWS was Amazon monetizing its own infrastructure. AWS builds infrastructure and monetize them. AWS's hardware usage far exceeds what they need for their other businesses.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thinkling 8y agoAWS wasn't Amazon.com's infrastructure. The store didn't run on AWS for a long time. I believe it was more Amazon monetizing spare hardware capacity.
- zumu 8y ago> it... is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. AWS is what is actively taking over data centers. If it were to start running on Amazon chips, the result may possibly the same.
- projektfu 8y agoI wonder how much of the overall datacenter/server market Amazon and other cloud providers have captured.
- jimbokun 8y agoIt may not be "home grown", depending on how you want to define that term, but it does point to a vector for Intel's business model to be disrupted. Going to ARM for chip IP, tweaking it, and then going to TSMC or some other manufacturing specialist could steadily eat away at Intel's market share and margins. Apple has now gone this route, Amazon is testing the waters, and other tech giants probably aren't far behind.
- monocasa 8y ago> Going to ARM for chip IP, tweaking it Just going to throw out there that Amazon paid more for Annapurna than Apple paid for P.A. Semi. That very well might imply that they have a custom uarch. Homegrown very well might be an apt adjective.
- monocasa 8y ago> I find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree. Would you say the same thing about Apple, who has their own ARM uarch?
- zapita 8y agoApple is also a TSMC customer I believe.
- monocasa 8y agoSo is AMD (they're shutting down GloFlo).
- cdmckay 8y agoI thought they spun it off?
- monocasa 8y agoThey did, but recently GloFlo announced that they're stopping R&D on newer nodes and are switching purely to sustaining engineering.
- kankroc 8y agoSource? GloFo stopped pursuing 7nm but that is far from shutting down.
- monocasa 8y agoEveryone working on R&D either got laid off, or moved to sustaining engineering on existing nodes. AMD is doing 7nm on TSMC. That's about as shut down as foundries get since the capital investment is all up front.
- ATsch 8y agoI'm not sure how they could shut down GloFo, considering they don't own it. Besides, GloFo is still doing decently even if they've dropped 7nm... high-end isn't the whole chip market. And AMD is still using GloFo for non-7nm designs.
- dang 8y agoOk, we've taken out the word "homegrown" above.
- andyidsinga 8y agoits conceivable (even likely?) that they've developed some exotic peripherals that go along with the arm core in order to complete their asic ...which sort of gets them into the same ballpark of defining their own ISA.
- twtw 8y ago> Amazon became an ARM architecture licensee Does Amazon really have an ARM architecture license? I thought these chips were using stock ARM cores (licensing cores only, not architecture). I asked on HN on the original announcement and it sounded like that was the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18553028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18553028 Also, I would argue that a custom ISA matters far less than a custom microarchitecture. After all, Intel is (mostly) using AMD's ISA.
- evancox100 8y agoAlso curious about this. Would be shocked if Amazon went straightaway for an architecture license.