Saturday, July 11, 2015

Hyperscale providers developing their own processors?


With increasing migration to the public clouds,  it appears that 70% of all Enterprise workloads would run in the public clouds.  90% of those workloads expected to be run in Amazon, Google Compute and Microsoft Azure public clouds.

With so much of processing power centralized,  it may seem natural for these companies to look into developing their own processors tuned to their workloads.

Many articles talked about rumors about these companies having strategy to develop processors.

Some interesting articles I could find are :

https://www.theinformation.com/Amazon-Google-Eye-New-Chips-for-Servers
https://gigaom.com/2014/04/28/amazon-joins-other-web-giants-trying-to-design-its-own-chips/

Above two articles seem to suggest Amazon with decent hiring of Engineers from failed ARM server startup company (Calxeda) is designing their own ARM server chips.

https://gigaom.com/2013/12/12/google-may-be-making-its-own-custom-server-chips-it-should/

This old article seems to suggest that Google is also thinking of designing their own server chips.

What do you think?  When would this happen in your view.

My take is that it would be a while before they decide to build their own chips.  It may be possible that some specialized chips may be designed by them for specific work loads.  But,  creating a general purpose processor could be a challenging task. 

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