Isn’t Ampere essentially the only company making server grade ARM chips.
And all the rest of ARM customers are making mobile/desktop.
So Ampere is going after a completely different segment that the rest of ARM customers aren’t addressing.
And all the rest of ARM customers are making mobile/desktop.
So Ampere is going after a completely different segment that the rest of ARM customers aren’t addressing.
Often times these companies might have an idea for how to save power / tweak cores in a weird way on a CPU, but have a chicken-and-egg problem with not knowing exactly how much it'll reduce COGS. Not knowing that and having to negotiate with a vendor (who will often want to charge more for the feature) means that it's difficult to do unless it's an obvious slam-dunk.
By bringing chip development in-house, adding new features skews more towards a political decision that requires less rigorous financial calculations (e.g. "how much power will this save relative to the vendor_cost++ and our own developer cost?" for 3rd-party chips). It basically allows these cloud providers to ship new features more quickly in their CPUs.
I use Hetzner ARM machines myself and they're great, and something something i THINK there's less abuse and noisy neighbors on ARM since it's slightly less skiddie friendly (can't run random x86 binaries)
https://mikrotik.com/product/rds2216
Interesting enough Mikrotik announced a co-development with Ampere last year. https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/blog/2024/09/24/27...
There's a distinction that has to be made here.