News Amazon looks to ARM for next-gen cloud servers

"turned almost-everything seller" haha this made me laugh so true! Shall be interesting with google announcing the power8 motherboard the other day. Both seem to be looking at alternatives to intel.

 

"it wouldn't be surprising to see Intel making some dramatic changes to its Xeon family in the near future to better fight off the continued threat of non-x86 chips in the data centre." Eh... not sure about that. Intel's Xeon Phi was basically the closest thing they had that was a competitor to ARM servers and it wasn't used for very long. Intel is so caught up in their own ideals that I don't think they'll ever tweak their technologies for the sake of competing with ARM. All intel has to do is release a 6 or 8 core CPU with HT, drop the clock speed to around the 1-2GHz range and they've got a product no single ARM CPU can match. But, it takes more than that - Intel's pricing is ridiculous. I'd say AMD is in a better position than Intel when it comes to competing against ARM in the server world.

 

The only thing that makes Xeon Phi similar is the fact that it uses several low-power cores. I admit I don't know the complete functionality of it, because for all I know it could be used as parallelizing a single task rather than run several separate instances of tasks. So depending on which one of those it does, then yeah, I guess it isn't similar at all.

I must be thinking of the pre-Phi naming scheme (like Knight's Ferry) where, from what I recall, were not very successful products and based on Atom cores. If you haven't noticed, I don't really keep up with this product line. I could have sworn I heard they actually discontinued the product line at one point.

 

if amazon can knock out 64bit ARM from caladex and quickly , they wont need to use intel anymore.

 

Indeed, Gareth is right - Xeon Phi competes with Nvidia's Tesla, not ARM!

However, Intel just layed off the whole Xeon Phi team in Barcelona, so I don't know what its long term future is. (They managed to make sure you can't google that by announcing they'd sponsor Barcelona FC at the same time, incredible!)

 

A lot of rumour and no real fact to back it up, they may eventually head ARM but I dou't it will happen as fast as anyone would expect. First thing amazon will do is likely query whoever supply's there Intel servers to see if they can offer better value for money ( which is all its really about as ARM is not beating intel on performance)

If they can offer them a better deal amazon will probably shift the staff to kindle if that's not what its for to begin with.

As for a AMD come back into this space that road ended a while ago. They are more intrested in all in one soc solutions like the ps4 and Xbox.

 

http://www.techradar.com/news/compu...ed-amd-opteron-a1100-processor-series-1223236

 

Arm based is not x86 is it now? If they wanna go ARM thats good for them but its not really competing with Intel. ( Even the post you linked shows Arm as a whole expect to get 25% of the market by 2019, Leaving Intel with its 75% to increase profits even more and rip people off further sweet)

Not seen anything but theory that ARM will be able to compete with Intel where it would matter to most of the major players. If it was a viable product today Amazon and company would surely off jumped at the chance to buy a cheap low power solution as the cost per unit would be vastly under Intels over charged stuff.

 

stunningly ARM is what this thread is about.....