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by _huayra_ 463 days ago
Even 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.

1 comments

Yeah and you can solve exactly your problems without worrying about anyone else.