Now, you have huge entities like AWS that can, for example, move things like ALB, RDS, SQS, or Aurora off of Intel on little more than a whim.
Basically, the leverage on the customer side is consolidated now, and the barrier to leave you is lower.
Whom is Amazon going to sell low-bin Gravitons to? It isn't cost effective to run them, just like it's not cost effective to use low-binned Intel or AMD chips in datacenters. It's intrinsic to the way all chips are manufactured.
Making your own low performance chips makes clear economic sense, as the producer and consumer of all output. But there have been decades of people trying to make their own high-performance chips as both consumer and producer, and they inevitably fail. And it's not super black and white, whose "subsidizing" whom, in the chip business - datacenter purchasers get cheaper chips because Intel can sell lower-binned parts to enthusiasts, while enthusiasts get cheaper parts because datacenters pay more. Same thing is observed for GPUs, product segmentation in chips is a real synergy and not zero sum.
Who knows if that will succeed, for the idiosyncratic reason of the foundry business being separate from the IP business. Did it really just take a corporate reorg? Maybe AMD was right.
But my point on how easy it is now, as compared to the past, for large swaths of customers to move away from Intel, stands. Moving to AMD or some 3rd party ARM provider are options outside of Graviton that can be done quickly.
While I recognized that this is indeed the case, I'd not considered some of the recent plays that Apple has been making. Forget those Gravitons. Forget those low volume datacenter ARM chips too. Also forget those high-binned EYPC and Xeon chips.
What happens when those rackmount Mac Pro machines go to Apple silicon? Datacenters are already paying a premium for processors, but these are much better at performance-per-watt, and Apple can afford to cut the prices on the first and second generation ones to make it up in volume and then ratchet up the prices later once they've got the marketshare.
They'd just run their internal clusters with the high binned parts, and the low binned parts would go into their AWS budget tiers.
Tada! Now they've got the best, and unloaded the rest onto suckers while billing them for the privilege.
And low bin chips are still going to be more power efficient than the previous generation.
The answer is nothing. If it isn't already, TSMC will eventually pass the cost onto Apple.
If they're starting with designs that are very energy/heat efficient then couldn't they fuse off the bad parts of the dies and then glue like 10 of them onto a single interposer and still have a tdp competitive with x86 server parts?
To the same customers as higher-bin Gravitons. It'll just be sold in the form of services, where you don't get to see the CPU directly.
Man, I would not know if amazon was bribing anandtech or something, but the gravitron2s are they're wiping the floor here with Intel and Amd when it comes to performance per cost and even holding their own single threaded which I did not expect.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...