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Amazon can afford to go all-in on building their own chips, with a solid goal of moving (almost?) all their AWS services over to them (I would bet good money th
by Twirrim 7y ago
Amazon can afford to go all-in on building their own chips, with a solid goal of moving (almost?) all their AWS services over to them (I would bet good money that will become a requirement for services). They're also more forward thinking and experimental than most companies are, or can afford to be. The x86 is the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" of CPUs.
This promises to be quite interesting. If Amazon can prove ARM as viable on their scale, that'll help companies like Qualcomm who were struggling to drum up attention from the more traditional markets.
- walrus01 7y agoYes, that's great for amazon, but what about everyone else on the planet who has x86-64 hypervisors and would like to have the option of purchasing a 3rd choice of CPU which is not Intel or AMD, at a price/performance ratio that is somewhat competitive with existing options?
- Twirrim 7y agoThere are other x86-64 CPU manufacturers, but you're making a massive trade off for performance. Intel and AMD really have polished their stuff until it shines. If Amazon can prove ARM can cope with server scale operations, and even outperform x86-64, you can have a high degree of confidence that other companies will get in the game. There are many more companies manufacturing ARM chips than x86-64 (due to licensing agreements, in part)