Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

There was no competitive ARM CPU targeting laptop or datacenter users either, until Apple up and made one.

For Intel to ignore RISC-V right now would be to completely neglect the lessons of Apple Silicon. They appear to have waited until there was an actual product taking their market share before taking ARM seriously. I expect them to learn from that and not wait for a product this time.

View on HN

ARM in the datacentre was somewhat of a hot topic for a while before Apple released their laptop CPUs; Amazon launched the first Gravitron to GA in 2018. Ampere launched publicly available ARM server CPUs in 2020, around the same time as Apple. Alibaba Cloud launched their instances based on their own CPU in 2021, as did Oracle (based on Ampere's CPUs).

Given the years of engineering effort involved in getting any of these projects to release, this definitely looks like an industry shift, not something driven by Apple.

Perhaps Intel's thinking here is that competition with ARM will drive innovation and cost-downs in that space, which will bleed 'up' and make their own competition's (mostly ARM) products even more competitive.

Note that the shipping RISC-V SoC currently most suited to datacentres, the SG2042, is more powerful than the first Graviton deployed to AWS in November 2018 (five years ago) -- the C910 cores in the SG2042 are similar to the Arm A72 cores in the Graviton, but the SG2042 has 64 of them vs 16 in the Graviton.

Multiple companies have M1-class RISC-V in the pipeline.

Lol. Fanboi.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com