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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#21

Post by blihp »

imtringued wrote: post #12

Why should intel be scared of AWS selling overpriced ARM servers? Scaleway offers 8 core servers with 8GB for almost half the monthly price of the cheapest ARM instance (with 1 core) amazon offers. Even the 16 core instance doesn't make sense. Packet.net will give you a whole 96 core server for the same price with 4x the memory. Capable ARM hardware has existed for years already and AWS is barely able to catch up. Ye…

Because this is just their first generation of chips. Should Amazon stick with it, they will get better at it and costs will come down while performance goes up. This should scare Intel because they have been banking on the data center for future growth. This looks like pretty much their last stand for a place where they can maintain margins. They lost mobile very early on. More recently it's looking like PCs are at risk thanks to competition from AMD. If they start losing their large volume enterprise customers, they'll need to come up with a plan D.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#22

Post by Despegar »

projektfu wrote: post #7
ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

From the article: "Amazon licensed much of the technology from ARM, the company that provides the basic technology for most smartphone chips. It made the chip through TSMC, a Taiwanese company." Amazon became an ARM architecture licensee and had their variant manufactured for them by TSMC. I find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree. That s…

I think it's fair to call it home grown, like in house, but to say it threatens Intel is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. Seems unlikely. Amazon also has to be careful now not to run afoul of anyone's IP as they can't farm out that responsibility to other providers.

Well I'd say it's certainly a big risk to Intel. For one, a lot of Intel customers are going in-house with chip design. Apple on its own might not hurt much, but add a few more like Amazon or Google, and things can really unravel. If you're an integrated chip designer and you lose volume, you're in for a lot of pain.

The thing that defines Amazon in recent years is their desire to make everything a third party service (AWS, Fulfillment, etc) and they may in fact do that for their own chips. So while Apple may never sell their chips to anyone, Amazon may decide to enter the merchant chip business (if they decide it's not a competitive advantage). Maybe they wouldn't sell it to Microsoft or Google, but certainly other companies that they don't compete with that operate their own servers (Facebook). And then Intel would really be losing volume.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#23

Post by PowerfulWizard »

cronix wrote: post #18

I could almost hear Larry Ellison snickering in the background as I read this. I wonder how much Amazon pays Oracle, anyway? I think in '16 is was around $60M (according to Ellison: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/12/12/oracles-la... )

Some more info here: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2018/11/1227/

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#25

Post by bgee »

cronix wrote: post #18

I could almost hear Larry Ellison snickering in the background as I read this. I wonder how much Amazon pays Oracle, anyway? I think in '16 is was around $60M (according to Ellison: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/12/12/oracles-la... )

may or may not be on-topic: ‘Keep Talkin’ Larry’: Amazon Is Close to Tossing Oracle Software [0].

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-09/-keep-tal...

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#26

Post by PowerfulWizard »

comboy wrote: post #4

This can be powerful. They don't have to build general CPU right away. Start with storage and by the time you have database boxes on ASICS designed to match your software you're already winning. I'm surprised there's still not much effort to make FPGAs more affordable and base everything on it. With this scale it seems like it should be a win on the long run over deploying new ASICs every few years.

The CPU is the third such project that I'm aware of, also checkout their Nitro hypervisor and disk interface: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...

I know they did their own networking hardware, but I don't know if it was done by the same team that did this CPU and Nitro.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#27

Post by karmasimida »

imtringued wrote: post #12

Why should intel be scared of AWS selling overpriced ARM servers? Scaleway offers 8 core servers with 8GB for almost half the monthly price of the cheapest ARM instance (with 1 core) amazon offers. Even the 16 core instance doesn't make sense. Packet.net will give you a whole 96 core server for the same price with 4x the memory. Capable ARM hardware has existed for years already and AWS is barely able to catch up. Ye…

Not overpriced if there isn't any other vendor doing the same thing.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#29

Post by monocasa »

comboy wrote: post #20
muricula wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not storage, networking: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

Indeed, with networking it seems to have already happened, if I remember correctly Google also uses software defined networking based on their own hardware (not sure if FPGAs are involved)

They're definitely using miracom lanai chips for part of it at least; google engineers are the maintainers of the lanai llvm backend.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#30

Post by btian »

40acres wrote: post #8

Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." When it comes to semiconductors I'd say: "Everyone wants to make their own chips until they have to do so at scale". (Doesn't roll of the tounge as well!) There is definitely a threat from Apple, Amazon, Google and especially China that will put Intel's market share in target distance, but making chips at scale is incredibly difficult. It's ha…

But TSMC has demonstrated many times that they can make chips at scale.

I don't see why they would fail this time.

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