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by cjsplat 1101 days ago
Impossible to know from the outside.

We know what they are selling it for, but that isn't the same.

True TCO needs to include the cost to develop the chip - after all, that is folded into the x86 price.

If you assume that the Graviton project is $250M per chip design for the 3 iterations, and the online estimates of 1 million chips is accurate, then you need to add about $750 per CPU, beyond the probably $250 per chip fab'ed and packaged.

$1000 per chip gets you a lot of x86 horsepower.

1 comments

$250M seems a massive overestimate given that the majority of the design is done by ARM and licensed from them.
For example see :

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-dark-side-of-the-semicond...

I think you are overestimating the value and amount of help from ARM, especially in the more recent Graviton generations, but of course I don't know Amazon's actual chip cost profile.