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You maybe aren't appreciating the scale of the cloud companies properly. In 2019, Amazon had 6x the Capex of AMD's entire revenue. Google 4x, Microsoft 3x. Obvi
by jsnell 6y ago
You maybe aren't appreciating the scale of the cloud companies properly. In 2019, Amazon had 6x the Capex of AMD's entire revenue. Google 4x, Microsoft 3x. Obviously all of that Capex isn't for compute, but given the cost structure of servers, a significant chunk will be.
If AMD can profitably build and sell a state of the art CPU in the world with that scale, why couldn't the cloud companies be able to?
- baybal2 6y ago> why couldn't the cloud companies be able to? That's easy to say, now think of why other companies with n-times money "can't simply do that"? It takes quite a lot of effort, and skill: execution capability. GAF companies are easy money companies, they, and their executives are not made for that.
- jsnell 6y agoBut your initial argument wasn't about competence, it was an economic argument about scale. To quote, "the internet companies are too small", "No amount I can imagine can pay off for the tapeout on the latest node for them". Given you've pivoted away from the economics to claiming that they just can't do it, how do you explain the results from this article? Shouldn't Amazon have been too incompetent to build a state of the art server CPU? How about Google's TPUs, in-house switches, and in-house NIC ASICs? Just failed prestige projects?