Amazon's own proprietary CPU is casting a dark shadow on Intel chip business



Although Amazon is the world's largest EC service, in reality most of the revenue is earned by the server business AWS (Amazon Web Service). Amazon announced that it developed its own chip for servers used for such earning AWS. The New York Times pointed out that the move to develop unique chips by Amazon and other large companies may mean that Intel's business, which is making great profits in the server business, has crossed the crossroads.

Amazon's Homegrown Chips Threaten Silicon Valley Giant Intel - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/technology/amazon-server-chip-intel.html

In November 2018, Amazon announced its own development processor "Graviton" to be used on a server used by AWS. Amazon has revealed that it is a policy to switch millions of AWS servers operating around the world to their own chip Graviton.

Companies that used servers such as cloud business such as AWS and EC site construction used a server equipped with Intel's CPU. As a matter of course, highly versatile CPUs for servers designed to be used by many companies are required. However, it means that versatile chips are not customized, specifically for customer service. In other words, although it can cope with any service, it can be said that it is a compromise in terms of performance such as efficiency and high-speed performance.



Using servers with Intel chips that are sacrificed in efficiency can cause significant losses for companies like Amazon that build servers with millions of servers. Amazon, which bought Israel's Annapurna Labs in 2015 to develop a processor specialized in its own service AWS, has steadily developed its own chip and finally Graviton was born.



According to Amazon, Graviton, which was developed based on ARM, was designed with focus on energy efficiency, which means that the power cost of the data center can be drastically reduced. We already have a Graviton chip as a server option, and some of our customers seem to be showing companies that can reduce service usage costs by 45%.

Amazon is now able to reduce the running cost of AWS by Graviton's development, but still it is thought that delivery cost of Intel chip server to be used together can be drastically reduced. If it says "negotiate price" only "transfer work load to other", Intel is forced to concede, so it is thought that equipment installation cost can be lowered.



Special technologies are required to design and manufacture processors for servers developed by Intel and AMD. Therefore, AMD's former CEO Andrew Feldmann said, "Manufacturer of processors for servers among processors has been thought of as requiring some magic, you had no choice but to choose Intel or AMD "I said. However, the rise of the so-called "GAFA" called Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon has greatly changed the structure that service users have to rely on Intel.

GAFA that gains huge profits has enough money to develop its own chip, and by purchasing powerful technologies, GAFA can develop its own processor specialized for its own service.

Google has developed a unique chip "TPU" which is also used for AI development and has already put it into practical use.

2nd generation of Google machine learning machine "TPU", 1 board 180 TFLOPS reaching 11.5 PFLOPS at 64 grid - GIGAZINE



Apple has developed its own chip "A" series for mobile products such as iPhones and realized high performance which is no longer catching up with the Intel chip. Also, thanks to Apple's proprietary development of the A Series, we have developed unique technologies such as FaceID and ARKit , which also has the merit of being able to differentiate iPhone.

"A12 Bionic" chip installed in the iPhone XS generation turned out to have enough power to drive MacBook - GIGAZINE



Facebook is also believed to be independently developing SoC, ASIC, etc. for AI service.

A move by Facebook to organize an SoC / ASIC development team within the company, turned out to be for AI, servers or new devices - GIGAZINE



In addition, Amazon also announced the independent tip "Inferentia" for machine learning independently of Graviton for CPU for AWS. James Hamilton, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon's Cloud Computing division, continues to express that it will continue to develop its own chip for specialized tasks such as artificial intelligence.


Intel lost business opportunities, missing the transformation of computing moving from PC to mobile terminal. Furthermore, as the importance of machine learning technology such as AI has increased, NVIDIA and others to develop GPUs were allowed to rise.

More than 90% of Intel's profits, which can not create the next business opportunity, are generated from chips for servers and AI. Among rapidly growing cloud computing services, Microsoft, Alibaba, and others, who have lost the large customers such as Amazon who developed their own chips, and the computer systems in the company are removed and transferred to the cloud, While thinking about rebuilding, Intel's business may be at a big crossroads.

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in Hardware, Posted by darkhorse_log