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Apple (M1) and Amazon (Graviton) are already out there marketing how great their chips are for various applications. They're not saying "ARM chips are great" th

Apple (M1) and Amazon (Graviton) are already out there marketing how great their chips are for various applications. They're not saying "ARM chips are great" they're saying "Apple silicon" or in the case of Amazon, "AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2". The thing to worry about is not them "locking it down" it's that they're building custom hardware that you can only access by renting cloud computing (EC2) or buying a complete machine (Apple).

worker767424 6y ago
With Graviton, it's really just try it for your use case, see if it's cheaper.
- shmoogy 6y ago
  All their managed services will be running off them in time
- russli1993 6y ago
  I think its just the beginning. They are testing the market for their own silicon and reception from market. They are also going to need a userbase for Graviton products as well so portability in the beginning is important. This is true in any product. In the early days, increase market and mind share. So you need to make it as easy to adopt as possible. Then, add differentiation, so you product stand out from the others to continue attract users. Then slowly add some barriers for people to leave your product for a competitor's product. You want to increase moat and protection against competitors. I don't think Amazon will throw in the resources to build a chip just to offer cheaper prices than competitors alone. Pretend you are Amazon. Remember, the cost of building a chip is similar between you and another guy. And if you are getting less return on investment compared the other guy why bother? It has to be that getting into chips will give you more return on investment than the other guy. But return on investment comes from many forms. For example, using graviton to run VMs is cheaper and leading your customer to use AWS more and less likely to leave AWS is another form of return. In this strategy, you need to build up the barrier for customers to leave. You could do it by making the stuff customer use with their VMs have lock-in effect, for example databases or storage that only runs or works better on AWS. Or you can directly make sure things customers run on Graviton cannot be run on anywhere else. By the way, a better hardware performance is hard to maintain. If everyone uses the same instruction sets and the same manufacturing process, the only way you can be faster than the other guy by better circuit design. But there is only so much you can squeeze out of a circuit design and its really hard to maintain a sizable lead for many many years. Look at how AMD designed a better circuit and Intel's competitive position is gone. Changing the way software interact with the hardware is next easiest thing to do, and especially easy if you have a lot of leverage over software, OS, APIs, programming languages and developers. Basically what companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple all excel at. See the addition of matrix operations for ML significantly increased performance. And how Apple can use their control over iOS APIs to build CoreML, get developers to use it, and have add special instructions and function blocks to their hardware to accelerate core ml. It will be interesting to see how this develops, but it would be only natural for these companies to explore this direction.
  - 7952 6y ago
    But they will not necessarily want to pass on all the savings to their customers. They may be cheaper on the price list, but that also reflects greater risk in using a less familiar platform.
eloff 6y ago
Yeah, that's it. I would consider buying an A1 if such a thing were possible. But I'll buy AMD and build a desktop even though that's not ideal when I travel (I'll have to downgrade to my old MBP). But if I buy a system I want to run Linux for work and windows for games. Apple and I will just never get along if they can't open up their hardware.
spideymans 6y ago
Further, Microsoft will be incentivized to sell their chips to Windows OEMs. Because Microsoft makes both the CPU and the operating system, they'll be unparalleled integration and optimization between the Windows OS and the silicon (this leaves Intel and AMD at a huge competitive disadvantage) I doubt Microsoft will lock out Intel or AMD, but we could see certain Windows features compatible only with Microsoft silicon.
- 238475235243 6y ago
  If? They already do. Why is nobody aware of the surface pro X?
  - spideymans 6y ago
    Sorry, I meant to say if MS makes Surface CPUs and licenses them to OEMs. I'm aware of the Surface Pro X. Edited my comment accordingly

worker767424 6y ago

With Graviton, it's really just try it for your use case, see if it's cheaper.

shmoogy 6y ago
All their managed services will be running off them in time
russli1993 6y ago
I think its just the beginning. They are testing the market for their own silicon and reception from market. They are also going to need a userbase for Graviton products as well so portability in the beginning is important. This is true in any product. In the early days, increase market and mind share. So you need to make it as easy to adopt as possible. Then, add differentiation, so you product stand out from the others to continue attract users. Then slowly add some barriers for people to leave your product for a competitor's product. You want to increase moat and protection against competitors. I don't think Amazon will throw in the resources to build a chip just to offer cheaper prices than competitors alone. Pretend you are Amazon. Remember, the cost of building a chip is similar between you and another guy. And if you are getting less return on investment compared the other guy why bother? It has to be that getting into chips will give you more return on investment than the other guy. But return on investment comes from many forms. For example, using graviton to run VMs is cheaper and leading your customer to use AWS more and less likely to leave AWS is another form of return. In this strategy, you need to build up the barrier for customers to leave. You could do it by making the stuff customer use with their VMs have lock-in effect, for example databases or storage that only runs or works better on AWS. Or you can directly make sure things customers run on Graviton cannot be run on anywhere else. By the way, a better hardware performance is hard to maintain. If everyone uses the same instruction sets and the same manufacturing process, the only way you can be faster than the other guy by better circuit design. But there is only so much you can squeeze out of a circuit design and its really hard to maintain a sizable lead for many many years. Look at how AMD designed a better circuit and Intel's competitive position is gone. Changing the way software interact with the hardware is next easiest thing to do, and especially easy if you have a lot of leverage over software, OS, APIs, programming languages and developers. Basically what companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple all excel at. See the addition of matrix operations for ML significantly increased performance. And how Apple can use their control over iOS APIs to build CoreML, get developers to use it, and have add special instructions and function blocks to their hardware to accelerate core ml. It will be interesting to see how this develops, but it would be only natural for these companies to explore this direction.
- 7952 6y ago
  But they will not necessarily want to pass on all the savings to their customers. They may be cheaper on the price list, but that also reflects greater risk in using a less familiar platform.

eloff 6y ago

Yeah, that's it. I would consider buying an A1 if such a thing were possible. But I'll buy AMD and build a desktop even though that's not ideal when I travel (I'll have to downgrade to my old MBP). But if I buy a system I want to run Linux for work and windows for games. Apple and I will just never get along if they can't open up their hardware.

spideymans 6y ago

Further, Microsoft will be incentivized to sell their chips to Windows OEMs. Because Microsoft makes both the CPU and the operating system, they'll be unparalleled integration and optimization between the Windows OS and the silicon (this leaves Intel and AMD at a huge competitive disadvantage) I doubt Microsoft will lock out Intel or AMD, but we could see certain Windows features compatible only with Microsoft silicon.

238475235243 6y ago
If? They already do. Why is nobody aware of the surface pro X?
- spideymans 6y ago
  Sorry, I meant to say if MS makes Surface CPUs and licenses them to OEMs. I'm aware of the Surface Pro X. Edited my comment accordingly