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Comment by matt-p | Hacker News Reader

Obviously not OP, but:

Lock-in to x86 or ARM is painful from an operator like AWSs perspective. With x86 you end up with two vendors to play off against each other, which isn't great. ARM gives you the ability to design your own silicon, but you're still beholden to a single licensor -- arguably worse. On top of that, some customers mandate a specific ISA or even a specific vendor, so none of it is truly fungible outside vertically integrated workloads like S3.

The ideal scenario for a hyperscaler is an open architecture at the core with 10+ competing implementations -- including potentially their own.

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> The ideal scenario for a hyperscaler is an open architecture at the core with 10+ competing implementations -- including potentially their own.

This is what Arm actually is. Arm primarily functions as a talking shop for random insights to get back from integrators into the ISA and architecture, then cleared and released for everyone to use. The reason there are so few novel implementations of it is it just isn’t worth the trouble unless you are pushing mobile levels of units.

On top of that, some customers mandate a specific ISA or even a specific vendor, so none of it is truly fungible outside vertically integrated workloads like S3.

I would be very interested to be a fly on the wall when a customer attempts to mandate to AWS they must support an ISA that AWS doesn't have plans to support out, say, a decade[1]. That would be almost as amusing as the many, many times I've heard clients say "we spend $X million dollars with Microsoft! We're a Big Company! We have leverage! Of course they'll do what we want!". And the local M$ salesthing just smiles nods and says "I'll get back to you on that..." and for some reason Nadella doesn't return their calls.

[1] Maybe if one of the big nations says "thou shalt only use our glorious domestic processor, and the processor of thine enemy shall be verboten, for all the data things" or some such...but not a commercial enterprise.

Considering how consolidated the hyperscalar market is and their natural inclination to reduce hardware SKUs, I'm not entirely sure they would make it viable for multiple vendors to produce chips they could actually use. There is no reason to believe it'll work out differently from the ARM server market.

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