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Isn’t Ampere essentially the only company making server grade ARM chips. And all the rest of ARM customers are making mobile/desktop. So Ampere is going after
by alberth 2y ago
Isn’t Ampere essentially the only company making server grade ARM chips.
And all the rest of ARM customers are making mobile/desktop.
So Ampere is going after a completely different segment that the rest of ARM customers aren’t addressing.
- jsheard 2y agoThey're the only company selling server grade ARM chips but others are rolling their own for internal use, such as Amazons Graviton line. That's Ampere's problem really, their biggest potential customers are so big that they can afford to cut out middlemen like Ampere.
- _huayra_ 2y agoEven if Ampere could afford to undercut the internal development of these hyperscalar ARM chips (which to my knowledge they cannot), there is more value in in-housing ARM chips like Amazon / Microsoft are doing: you can more easily try out wacky ideas in chip / firmware design. Often times these companies might have an idea for how to save power / tweak cores in a weird way on a CPU, but have a chicken-and-egg problem with not knowing exactly how much it'll reduce COGS. Not knowing that and having to negotiate with a vendor (who will often want to charge more for the feature) means that it's difficult to do unless it's an obvious slam-dunk. By bringing chip development in-house, adding new features skews more towards a political decision that requires less rigorous financial calculations (e.g. "how much power will this save relative to the vendor_cost++ and our own developer cost?" for 3rd-party chips). It basically allows these cloud providers to ship new features more quickly in their CPUs.
- IshKebab 2y agoYeah and you can solve exactly your problems without worrying about anyone else.
- wmf 2y agoYeah, Ampere's only customers appear to be Oracle Cloud and some hobbyists. I was kind of expecting Oracle to buy them.
- jsheard 2y agoHetzner offers Ampere boxes too, but they're not exactly a hyperscaler.
- lillecarl 2y ago++ ScaleWay has Ampere ARM too I use Hetzner ARM machines myself and they're great, and something something i THINK there's less abuse and noisy neighbors on ARM since it's slightly less skiddie friendly (can't run random x86 binaries)
- geerlingguy 2y agoAzure also has Ampere, and they're used a good amount in Telco.
- Moose_the_Goose 2y agoMikrotik some how got a hold of Graviton cpu's for their Flagship router and now their new NAS/Router/Container Server. https://mikrotik.com/product/rds2216 https://mikrotik.com/product/rds2216 Interesting enough Mikrotik announced a co-development with Ampere last year. https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/blog/2024/09/24/271974440/MikroTik+and+Ampere+co-developing+a+groundbreaking+product+line+with+server-class+CPUs https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/blog/2024/09/24/27...
- jsheard 2y agoInteresting... that AL73400 part they're using is the first generation Graviton, and AFAICT that's not available on AWS anymore. Maybe Amazon considers it obsolete and is selling their stocks off to third parties like MikroTik?
- bionade24 2y agoIsn't Marvell/Cavium still in the ARM server business, too?
- sgerenser 2y agoNot since 2020: https://www.networkworld.com/article/969117/marvell-exits-the-general-purpose-arm-server-business.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/969117/marvell-exits-th...
- rabunite 2y agoNvidia is making arm server cpus.
- indrora 2y agoAmpere is the only one with a license to make server-grade ARM chips. There's a distinction that has to be made here.