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Intel foundry business to make custom chip for Amazon, chipmaker's shares jump
- ksec 2y agoAt one point 25% of Intel's DC revenue were coming from AWS, but the competition from AMD and AWS switching every function / service they run to their own Graviton just means Intel are no longer required for Amazon. And Intel might as well Fab chips for them to keep them as a customer. Another point I think Amazon is willing to partly / dual source ( I dont think Amazon is making a one way jump ) to Intel is TSMC is now constrained on leading node. It is always Apple or Nvidia. And the lead time for them to get any capacity spared is getting longer now Nvidia is also in the game.
- akira2501 2y ago> to their own Graviton For open source software loads. If you're running licensed software in the cloud you don't often get to make this choice.
- dh2022 2y agoWould you mind expanding on this? Why would I not be able to run Oracle or SQL server on Graviton? Than you !
- jiggawatts 2y agoThere are no ARM builds of Microsoft SQL Server. Even if Microsoft does release such as thing, enterprise software lives in an ecosystem of thousands of third-party vendors that provide components that are often co-installed on the same box. Also, products like MSSQL are licensed per CPU core, so you want the fastest possible cores, not the cheapest. Currently that's the AMD EPYC X86-compatible CPUs, which run rings around everything else.
- electronbeam 2y agoThe examples you gave are commonly available proprietary software, but it’s really the long tail of low volume software where the author will only support really specific configurations
- ZiiS 2y agoOracle charge per core; whilst Graviton has a lot of advantages, you can get a bit more out of a single amd64 core. SQL server doesn't even release for ARM AFAIK.
- nabla9 2y agoAmazon, Google or Meta design their own chips for the most part. They have chip designers in the company but most of the work is done companies like Broadcomm. Intel can sell design and manufacturing.
- osnium123 2y agoDo you think the US government also encouraged Amazon to throw Intel Foundry a bone and give them some business?
- UberFly 2y agoJust guessing but probably more something like Amazon striking a deal with Intel while they're desperate.
- ethbr1 2y agoWhen you're a customer big enough to be a press release and logo, and the seller is in need, you can be pretty aggressive with terms. It'll be curious how the financials on this look. I assume with Intel breaking foundry out into a subsidiary, they'll also break out revenue, and if this is their marque first big customers, it should show up in the numbers.
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoI guess its more of a trading in of outstanding old favours - all those trampolines back then where expensive, which we could have known if speculative execution would have been performed, but then again that 20 % speed plus would costs us in security.
- shrubble 2y agoIf Amazon supplies a lot of Federal or Military there might be a requirement that certain VMs run on CPUs that are made in the USA or that have very stringent supply chain controls.
- throwup238 2y agoIntel's main fabs are in Arizona. Their cutting edge CPUs are already made in the USA, no need for custom chips.
- ksec 2y ago
- jsyang00 2y ago[flagged]
- JonChesterfield 2y agoSee also the "everyone back to the office because fuck you" discussion thread. Probably not the time to go long AMZN.
- jrockway 2y agoI think that Amazon is past the point where excellent software engineering is what makes them money. What makes them money is going out for golf with some Fortune 500 exec that saw "Stats powered by AWS" on the last NFL game, and wants something like that for their company. They then buy 80 million dollars of reserved CPU hours and get tickets to the Seahawks game. These big companies are self-sustaining no matter how unfriendly to employees they might be. Yes, it's great when you hire great engineers and they invent the next billion dollar business. That is now a rounding error for Amazon, so they won't notice it's gone if it goes. And, a lot of engineers don't really care about returning to the office if it means they're getting paid $800k a year. So overall, with everyone's retirement plan buying Amazon stock by default (oh sorry "Target 2050 Fund" shares), I wouldn't expect one supplier change or one HR policy to make a significant difference in their stock price.
- WalterBright 2y ago> Amazon is past the point where excellent software engineering is what makes them money. It's worth many millions and millions of dollars to Amazon to improve server software efficiency by even 1%. I bet the software engineers that can make such optimizations are making $millions in compensation.
- xyst 2y agoWith the amount of money AMZN has at its disposal. I’m surprised they didn’t take the Apple route of making their own chip in house. Apple realized how bottlenecked they were with Intel, and took steps to remove that dependency. Could have been Jassys equivalent of Beso’s AWS, but unfortunately he’s a lousy leader with no imagination beyond the quarterly results.
- jeffnappi 2y agoApple doesn't manufacture the chips, they subcontract that out to TSMC/Samsung. In this case Intel is the contract manufacturer, not the chip designer fulfilling the same role as TSMC does for Apple.
- ac29 2y agoIsnt Graviton an in house design? And Intel is building an "AI fabric" chip for AWS, though its not clear who designed it.
- mdasen 2y agoNot really. Graviton chips just use off-the-shelf core designs from ARM. The Graviton used Cortex A72 cores, the Graviton2 Neoverse N1, Graviton3 Neoverse V1, and Graviton 4 Neoverse V2. Apple designs their own cores and Qualcomm is starting to. Most people just grab ARM's reference designs. They're sorta in-house in that they're putting it together, but they aren't doing the design work of actually making their own cores.
- Marsymars 2y ago> Apple designs their own cores and Qualcomm is starting to. Qualcomm already did for many years! The Snapdragon line from 2008-2016 used custom Scorpion/Krait/Kryo cores before they went to Cortex A73 cores in the Snapdragon 835.
- adrian_b 2y agoQualcomm have designed their own CPU cores for some years, but their design capacity could not keep up with the Arm company, so, exactly like Samsung and NVIDIA, they have given up and they have started to use the CPU cores designed by the Arm company, already for many years. Only now, after buying the Nuvia CPU design team, they have begun to use again their own CPU core designs, first in the laptops introduced a few months ago and then presumably also in the smartphones of next year. While many companies have designed Arm cores, only Apple has consistently outperformed the Arm company and now Qualcomm might have a chance to do that, with a team that includes many former Apple designers. The server Arm cores that have been demonstrated until now by the Ampere company are not impressive, being weaker than the Arm-designed cores used by Amazon or Microsoft.
- ac29 2y agoCEO letter is here: https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1710/a-message-from-intel-ceo-pat-gelsinger-to-employees https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1710/... There are a few threads on this now, so maybe they can be merged and linked to this primary source instead of news articles summarizing it.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41560359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41560359
- rubiquity 2y agoIt’s actually less discussion than here.
- 1-6 2y agoBuying Intel at this moment still feels like catching a falling knife. Buyer beware.
- Dalewyn 2y agoLook, I'm just curious if this guy will ever make his grandma proud: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1ehjuzj/i_bought_700k_worth_of_intel_stock_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1ehjuzj/i_b...
- high_na_euv 2y ago3-5 years
- formerly_proven 2y agoLeast suspicious HN username
- stackghost 2y agoMaking one's own processor design must be the new "every BigCo needs its own proprietary typeface" from yesteryear. Are we to believe that Amazon's workload is so unique that an existing design can't fit the bill? This is just a vanity exercise.
- wmf 2y agoIt's not vanity; the purpose is to reduce cost. "Your margin is my opportunity."
- tracerbulletx 2y agoI think you are vastly underestimating the benefits of optimizing specifically for the existing workloads at the scale of AWS.
- stackghost 2y agoWhat can graviton do that, e.g. POWER cannot?
- barkingcat 2y agoIt's not what POWER cannot, but about what graviton can CUT OUT and SPECIALIZE in while still being able to do what AWS wants. POWER from this perspective, does way too much. It's too much chip for AWS's needs, and a big waste of money. That's what optimization means! You get the smallest/ simplest/cheapest thing that does exactly what you want, and ignore the big bad "do everything" chips that go for megabucks. Then you can devote chip transistor count toward the instructions you want, and ditch all the dead weight that comes with a traditional chip like power, that tries to make a balanced general purpose cpu. This results in a chip that isn't good for anything but the specific need, but it's super cost effective and higher performing.
- Sakos 2y agoAlso likely far more power and heat efficient.
- BirAdam 2y agoDang. I should’ve bought the dip.
- WalterBright 2y agoThere is no winning with stock investing. 1. if you buy it, and it goes down, dammit I shouldn't have bought it. I'm so stupid. 2. if you buy it, and it goes up, dammit I should have bought more. I'm so stupid. It's nothing but regrets!
- Carrok 2y agoSounds like a you problem. 1. I buy, it goes down. “Meh. Can’t win ‘em all. Might as well hold see if it comes back.” 2. I buy, it goes up. “Nice.”
- lesuorac 2y agoYou still holding AIG? At some point all of your stocks are going to be in recovery mode if you never sell at a loss.
- WalterBright 2y agoIf I think it is a good company, I'll hold on the loss and wait. Intel has done well for me, I've held it for decades, but last summer my patience ran out and I sold it. But in all my years investing, I never get used to the downturns and have a hard time being sanguine about it.
- fsckboy 2y agoif you buy a broadly diversified index, if the market goes up, you are better off than you were; there is no justification in not participating in that. your investment going down means the whole economy went down: you are no worse off than the aggregate, and you still own your piece of the economy. if the whole economy goes down a lot, the widespread largescale unemployment means you are a lot better off than a lot of people, and you still own your segment of the economy. it's more of an opportunity cost type thing: you can't afford not to be fully invested. In general, the economy grows, you want to grow with it. nobody can predict downturns; anybody who can is busily correcting the market to make money from it; in any case, that's not us, so we do what we can do.
- georgeburdell 2y agoAs someone who has had the dubious honor of bidding to supply Amazon, they love dual sourcing to squeeze their suppliers, or just straight up using your bid to negotiate with their preferred supplier
- baq 2y agoCapitalism at its finest. No sarcasm. The only problem is efficiency vs redundancy tradeoff. The organization needs to be antifragile to cope with that.
- Rinzler89 2y ago>they love dual sourcing to squeeze their suppliers Yeah, it sucks working for one of their suppliers but every single major company does this: auto companies, console manufacturers, smartphone makers, white goods/appliances, etc. If you were running such a business, you'd do it to. It's how capitalism works.
- known 2y ago[dead]
- ckastner 2y ago> It also said it would pause construction at its chip factory project in Germany for two years, a move Reuters had previously reported. The company plans to pause its project in Poland as well. Just three days ago: Poland's Intel plant gets EU green light for $1.9B in state support [1]. Germany is subsidizing Intel with $11bn. I'd be fuming. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41534763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41534763
- chmod775 2y agoThe subsidies are contingent on Intel building a plant. Germany's finance minister is already eyeing those 11b to balance books, because it looks like they won't be needed for now. This stuff rarely takes the form of the government writing a cheque, especially not upfront.
- ckastner 2y agoFair point. I wonder whether there are any "outs". DE and PL subsidized because they want fabs ASAP; if Intel can't hold up their end, why not cancel the deal and go with TSMC or Samsung instead.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cracrecry 2y agoohh, the old trick of talking trash about a company in the mass media when you know an operation is in the works that will raise the stock, so you make the stock go down, you buy it, the operation is announced, you sell and profit. I have been hearing in the last week a lot of "Intel is doomed" and I wondered why. Now I Know.
- JonChesterfield 2y agoHow would you explain the "intel is doomed" theme from the five years before this week?
- Varloom 2y agoBig move for Amazon
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]