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Basically, no. Amazon has their Graviton processors, but they're not selling them. Nuvia's Phoenix processors might have become that, but they've been bought by
by mdasen 6y ago
Basically, no. Amazon has their Graviton processors, but they're not selling them. Nuvia's Phoenix processors might have become that, but they've been bought by Qualcomm and we'll see what happens.
Qualcomm is likely going to want to focus their talent on the mobile market where they've historically been running only slightly customized ARM designs. I think Qualcomm would like to close the performance gap between it and Apple and fend off MediaTek who is taking an increasing amount of marketshare. As the US weans off CDMA, it's likely that Samsung might end up using their own chips more. So Qualcomm might want to focus Nuvia on mobile.
Qualcomm had tried its hand at Intel competitors, both on the consumer and server side. They seem to have given up on that for now.
Ampere is trying to get into the server space, and Anandtech notes that they're competitive with the AMD EPYC Rome series (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review/9 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review...). Oracle said they'd launch some in 2021, but who knows how limited that will be or whether their plans will change.
Amazon will want to use their own chips rather than pay a third-party. More and more datacenter operations seem concentrated in the big three providers who might not want to let a new third-party get margin there (specifically, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft). I can't imagine Google not going with an in-house design if they wanted to launch an ARM platform.
Consumer devices are difficult. macOS won't work on non-Apple hardware. The Windows ARM experience will be sub-par because there's no dictator to force ARM on everyone (like Apple). Apple can say, "we're moving to ARM" and developers either get on board or are left behind. If Microsoft says, "we're moving to ARM" it's more like, "we're going to add ARM support, but we'll always be a first-class experience on Intel and you can still expect to run Win16 apps from 1990 on your new ARM computer and if developers and consumers don't show interest, we're flexible and we'll pivot away from ARM...so maybe don't buy an ARM machine right now because we haven't been able to convince developers...and since you won't buy the ARM machines, we'll probably just think it's a flop in two years and put fewer resources towards ARM...so there's no real reason for an ARM CPU company to want to make good CPUs...which reinforces why consumers shouldn't buy them..."
We are seeing movement in the space, but it's hard. I don't think we'll see a lot of consumer stuff for Windows and Linux comparable to Intel. I think it's just hard to break into that space. With Linux, the market is small already. With Windows, trying to convince consumers on a less-compatible experience or an experience that Microsoft is less committed to is hard. I think it's easier to compete against AMD and Intel in the server market where so much software is already CPU-independent and doesn't have the same reliance on consumer software and compatibility. I think if you're making consumer processors, you want to target Android and Chromebook where you won't be dealing with convincing consumers to select a lesser-compatible, lesser-supported alternative to Wintel.
- kllrnohj 6y ago> Amazon has their Graviton processors, but they're not selling them. Graviton2 is basically just an implementation of ARM's N1 design which uses a Cortex A76 CPU core. The single thread performance is better than like a Kirin 990, likely thanks to 32mb l3 cache and 8-channel memory controller, but it's not going to win any gaming performance crowns either.