[baybal2]

> I've been extremely skeptical of ARM EC2 instance types getting any sort of traction, as I don't believe most companies would bother to port their software to another architecture.

I think you miss a much bigger elephant in the room: Amazon is too small to get good offer when negotiating with fabs.

May sound weird to people from silicon valley.

Fabs, above all, like reliable clients with stable business because cashflow certainty is of vital importance in the fab business. Small orders are invariably very pricey, but so are big orders from companies that are "come and go" clients, whose own prospects and plans are uncertain.

[cowsandmilk]

> Amazon is too small to get good offer when negotiating with fabs.

Amazon literally has custom silicon in every machine they add to AWS now in the form of the nitro system. They are pretty damn big customers that are not “come and go”. If ELBs start using graviton, that’s a sizable subset of the instances in AWS data centers that isn’t even reliant on external customer demand.

[baybal2]

Nitro is an FPGA card as I was told, a very different kind of beast.

> damn big customers that are not “come and go”.

I think, they are. There is no guarantee for a FAB that they will not revert to vendor CPUs if over the years their team can't keep their design competitive. And their accounting...

Only way to guarantee so if for them to do a contract with a cash bond — a practice not uncommon in the industry, but the digit will be much bigger than for, say, a commodity 65nm asic, and amount of wafers they need.