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I'm not so sure about so many parts of this. I love working on ARM, but with the licensing model I'm not sure how much of a positive return Amazon would really

I'm not so sure about so many parts of this. I love working on ARM, but with the licensing model I'm not sure how much of a positive return Amazon would really be able to squeeze from their investment. It also potentially brings them a truckload of future headaches if any of their cloud competitors raise anti-trust concerns down the road. Beyond that, I think Apple, ARM and AMD get a lot of credit for their recent designs - a lot of which is due, but quite a bit of which should really go to TSMC. The TSMC 7nm fabrication node is what's really driven microprocessors forward in the last few years, and hardly anyone outside of our industry has ever heard of them. I don't know that Amazon couldn't transition to RISC-V if they needed to in a couple of years.

mywittyname 6y ago
I think it's still a sound investment, not for the ROI, but for a stake in controlling the future. They could mitigate the anti-trust angle a bit by getting Apple, IBM, and maybe Google onboard. Microsoft controls a lot of lucrative business-centric markets. An advantage that seems to have helped MS Azure surpass AWS in marketshare. One of Microsoft's weaknesses is their in-ability to migrate away from x86 in any meaningful way. IBM could used Redhat to push the corporate server market away from x86 under the guise of lower operating costs, which could deal a tremendous blow to MS, leaving Amazon and Google with an opening to hit the Office and Azure market.