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Comment by xt00 | Hacker News Reader

Basically the playbook for the cloud providers is to pretend that Intel and AMD don’t need to worry about it for as long as possible, then suddenly they will be close to price parity and then it’s bad news for Intel and AMDs server business.. hard to say on timeline though.

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Makes sense. In 2012, I was at a Fortune 10 oil and gas company that suddenly got squeezed by Oracle as our licenses were expiring. Given that most of the in house software was running on Oracle and leveraging one off functionality and APIs not standard in competitors or in the open source community and that most of the original devs had moved on (most were IT contractors anyway), we had little options. And the rates Oracle gave us were absurd, but they knew we were locked in, and they understood the industry was doin well and we had money (this is before the markets downward dive).

If you’re a cloud company, you absolutely, 100% do not want to depend on an Intel or AMD. If anything, as CEO, this is probably one of the what if scenarios that would keep you up at night.

It goes in both directions a bit. Because the biggest cloud providers are so huge, they do drive a massive chunk of revenue for Intel especially. I remember watching a Q&A with Scott Guthrie where he mentioned how much friendlier the Intel folks are now that Azure is such an enormous customer.

Yea good point. Intel will be like “we get it, you want to replace us, let us build the chip you want to build. We will give you a sweetheart deal.” And Amazon will be like cool we will but we are still working on our own thing. Which will pressure intel to keep their prices low.

While in theory there could be a lot more competition for arm based compute platforms, is there any risk of the cloud providers adding custom extensions to their silicon to increase performing, creating yet another platform lock-in? I'm thinking if the Intel compiler is somewhat analogous.

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