Why would you presume that the new hardware would cost 40% of the server? Sure it’s an accounting trick to decide how to amortize the development costs. However

Why would you presume that the new hardware would cost 40% of the server? Sure it’s an accounting trick to decide how to amortize the development costs. However they do it, I really doubt AWS would be continuing down the Nitro path if the TCO + savings wasn’t in the black. I’d like to see the energy efficiency of the new hardware and TCO estimates too, but probably that info is deemed “sensitive” and not released publicly. Likely the Nitro cards cost a fraction of that 30%, probably more like 5-15%. I’d wager that new hardware could have a huge energy efficiency gain for the specific Nitro workloads mentioned. The 30% resource utilization on Xen could be wasting a lot of time waiting for locks, context switch’s, etc between cores that could potentially be removed entirely from custom hardware optimized for handling multiple memory contexts simultaneously just by removing cache coherency at certain points.