That's pretty silly. What makes you say this? There are large groups at Google responsible for buying every computer there is and evaluating the TCO thereof. With operating expenses exceeding two billion dollars per week, they have a larger incentive to optimize their first-party power efficiency than anyone else in the business. I'm fairly certain their first-party workloads (search etc) are the largest workloads in the world.
> With operating expenses exceeding two billion dollars per week
"Alphabet operating expenses for the twelve months ending March 31, 2020 were $131.077B, a 13.47% increase year-over-year."
Operating expenses is everything, including salaries, etc. Google isn't dealing with $2B/wk in power/server purchases, though they're still huge, no doubt.
Neither Amazon nor Apple are buying off the shelf ARM chips. They are both designing processors to meet their needs. Amazon bought Annapurna labs and Apple bought a slew of companies specializing in processor design.
I don't think they would switch even if they could in the near future.
The poster above says that Amazons "leapfrogs." They question is "leapfrogs where?" The fact that ARM cores cost 100+ times less than Intel, and are n times more power efficient was well known for the whole eternity.
What people don't get is that you get the whole platform on x86, and ARM is a very, very DIY thing, even if you are a multinational with lots of money on RnD.
> I don't think they would switch even if they could in the near future.
They've already brandished their ability to port their whole product from x86 to POWER[1], and deploy POWER at scale if they need to[2]. My personal interpretation of these announcements is they are made with the purpose of keeping their Intel sales representatives in order, but the fact that you don't also see them or anyone else brandishing their AArch64 port should tell you something.
I'd say less bluntly that Google is not as innovative as it once was. Old large companies ossify, and Google is not an exception. It failed on the social network (facebook), it failed on the instant messaging (whatsapp), it failed on the picture meme (snapchat), it failed on the video meme (tiktok), it failed on videoconference (zoom) ... you may see some kind of pattern there.
If asked whether google will succeed at something new (say, Fuschia), given those priors, my response will be: "no. it would be a surprising first in many many years. the company is on decline"
What we're missing is the connection between the services of the large companies: Google, Amazon, Microsoft all have an offering made of devices (hardware), websites (software) and cloud services. There seems to be a synergy, where you benefit from doing all 3 things in-house to reduce costs on your core product or to capture consumer minds. Microsoft is getting back in phones, with an Android offering. Amazon is not giving up on Kindle.
Notice how Apple is missing on the cloud services part here. They have some internally (for Siri) but they do not sell them.
Even if they don't start a cloud offering, they may sell their CPUs to others who will, before eventually rolling their own hardware.
This will give time to people who adapt existing server software to work better on Apple ARM CPUs (recompiling is the tip of the iceberg, thing about the differing architecture, what can be accelerated etc.)
We are seeing SIMD/AVX optimization for database like computation just now. It may take a while.
Apple is not missing out because it doesn’t jump on every bandwagon that is not part of its core competency. It’s still the most profitable out of all the tech companies.
Youtube requires a lot of server space compared to tiktok (<10 min means no ad money, so people make videos at least 10 min long!), and Zoom requires almost no space, while it can sell corporate subscriptions.
The only reason youtube still enjoys some success now is because it wasn't made in house, and the acquisition wasn't too badly managed. Grandcentral (parts of which still live as google voice) was a different story.
But it only shows how the last success google made "in-house" was a long, long time ago. The alphabet rebranding changed nothing. Since youtube, Google has turned into another yahoo for startup: a place they go to shrivel and die.