Also, given they sell an OS to other manufactures to install on their own machines, they are going to keep that running for a while. Same with servers... Even in the Azure side, they are allowing enterprise and OEMs build Azure Stack. I cant see them locking it down... But Apple? yes... its already locked down...
The thing to worry about is not them "locking it down" it's that they're building custom hardware that you can only access by renting cloud computing (EC2) or buying a complete machine (Apple).
I don't think Amazon will throw in the resources to build a chip just to offer cheaper prices than competitors alone. Pretend you are Amazon. Remember, the cost of building a chip is similar between you and another guy. And if you are getting less return on investment compared the other guy why bother? It has to be that getting into chips will give you more return on investment than the other guy. But return on investment comes from many forms. For example, using graviton to run VMs is cheaper and leading your customer to use AWS more and less likely to leave AWS is another form of return. In this strategy, you need to build up the barrier for customers to leave. You could do it by making the stuff customer use with their VMs have lock-in effect, for example databases or storage that only runs or works better on AWS. Or you can directly make sure things customers run on Graviton cannot be run on anywhere else.
By the way, a better hardware performance is hard to maintain. If everyone uses the same instruction sets and the same manufacturing process, the only way you can be faster than the other guy by better circuit design. But there is only so much you can squeeze out of a circuit design and its really hard to maintain a sizable lead for many many years. Look at how AMD designed a better circuit and Intel's competitive position is gone. Changing the way software interact with the hardware is next easiest thing to do, and especially easy if you have a lot of leverage over software, OS, APIs, programming languages and developers. Basically what companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple all excel at. See the addition of matrix operations for ML significantly increased performance. And how Apple can use their control over iOS APIs to build CoreML, get developers to use it, and have add special instructions and function blocks to their hardware to accelerate core ml. It will be interesting to see how this develops, but it would be only natural for these companies to explore this direction.
I doubt Microsoft will lock out Intel or AMD, but we could see certain Windows features compatible only with Microsoft silicon.
That pretty much sealed the deal for any serious laptop makers and now we've got Microsoft embracing "alternate" instruction sets, Amazon embracing non-Intel data center architectures, and Apple out competing with a bespoke CPU in a bespoke laptop form factor.
<opinion!> Intel is toast. (if you were still wondering) Which truly sucks because you really really want and need a chip fab business that can compete on the global scale. Intel needs to be that business for the US (Sorry Global Foundries you had your chance)
RISC-V is the new 8080A, FPGAs are the new SoC. Look for a huge number of computers available in all price points based on RISC-V sitting inside FPGA fabrics. This is going to be driven by open source tools and a set of open source HDL cores for all of the "essential" peripherals.
The consumer device kingmakers will be graphics architecture suppliers. The biggest differentiator for the next few years will be "can your graphics card do this?!" </opinion!>
Not really. All this shuffling to "custom hardware" is due to the fact that Moore's Law broke a couple generations back.
Custom hardware makes no sense if you can just wait 18 months and the performance of a generic chip will double.
Once you can't just "wait for performance increases" then building your own silicon starts to make sense.
Custom hardware makes no sense if you can just wait 18 months and the performance of a generic chip will double. Once you can't just "wait for performance increases" then building your own silicon starts to make sense.
As a restatement of the economics of building competitive systems.
My comment was that the economic forces that allowed IBM, HP, and DEC to build custom hardware and recover those costs through sales have returned. The mechanism of that return is that Apple has shown that product differentiation through custom silicon is sufficient to add margin to a product above and beyond the cost of developing that custom silicon.
Your comment appears to say the same thing; which is that the previous strategy of maximizing margins of letting a semiconductor company produce a better chip and then use it, is no longer more effective than you telling a semiconductor fab to make the chip you want to use and then using that.
That is what you are saying isn't it?
Crystal ball tells me that someone will likely be Microsoft. If Microsoft has high performance Surface chips, there is little in the way of them licensing it to OEM partners. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, etc... won't be able to compete with MS, due to the vertical integration between the Windows operating system and Microsoft silicon.
(Incidentally, this is why I see efforts to remove backwards-compatibility from the PC as a hostile takeover and closing of the ecosystem.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing
The only way you get a standard like that is if a really big player, in this case Microsoft, steps in and sets the rules and does the work. It's not like backwards compatibility had enough inertia to do this without having someone set the standard.
No, the PC/AT was the de-facto standard and that came long before WHQL or anything else from MS.
Just look how hard it is to migrate a significant application from Oracle to SQL Server or Postgres. It's easy for a trivial application, but there are lots of things to trip you up if you're migrating some big hairy complicated application.
I'm not sure how much we will see divergence, or how much it matters to most developers. If the tools can compile/target a given CPU and operate, devs largely won't care. Some will, most won't.
I don't think that MS and Amazon will stray too far from generally supported 64-bit arm instructions as a base. Maybe hardware optimizations that will work better in some workloads, but the baseline will likely work. This is only because of the diverse languages and tools that they need to support.
I think it's more about shoring up options, reducing costs and optimizing data center layouts. When targeting cloud, many apps are already scaling horizontally. So you don't need to perform like an M1 for general use as long as you can scale horizontally enough at a competitive price point, you can get a very long way without a ton of custom extension.
Microsoft have considered their arm desktops as less serious than the others? If this new arm chip is meant to be an intel challenger that lower status must end. Universal binaries solve that too.
Imagine this: stick an M1-like CPU and GPU combo on a PCIe card. Run the games entirely on the card, using the host system as merely a way to provide data to the card. In one shot, you murder the AMD and Intel processor market - everyone can just buy the cheapest model and still play games, saving their money for the unified GPU/CPU board. It also paves the way for eGPU products for laptops becoming more mainstream, and could work towards a play for the Shield to become a console competitor (if cannibalizing their existing console business is worth it to them).
Also NVIDIA quit the mobile market a while ago. They are focused on Autonomous driving and embedded market. The only consumer product on the market with NVIDIA SoC is Nintendo Switch (which sells millions)