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Amazon Web Services Introduces its Own Custom-Designed ARM Server Processor, Promises 45 Percent Lower Costs For Some Workloads (geekwire.com)
After years of waiting for someone to design an ARM server processor that could work at scale on the cloud, Amazon Web Services just went ahead and designed its own. From a report: Vice president of infrastructure Peter DeSantis introduced the AWS Graviton Processor Monday night, adding a third chip option for cloud customers alongside instances that use processors from Intel and AMD. The company did not provide a lot of details about the processor itself, but DeSantis said that it was designed for scale-out workloads that benefit from a lot of servers chipping away at a problem. The new instances will be known as EC2 A1, and they can run applications written for Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu. They are generally available in four regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland). Intel dominates the market for server processors, both in the cloud and in the on-premises server market. AMD has tried to challenge that lead over the years with little success, although its new Epyc processors have been well-received by server buyers and cloud companies like AWS. John Gruber of DaringFireball, where we first spotted this story, adds: Makes you wonder what the hell is going on at Intel and AMD -- first they missed out on mobile, now they're missing out on the cloud's move to power-efficient ARM chips.
Here is a corrected link without the garbage: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-web-services-introduces-custom-designed-arm-server-processor-promises-45-percent-lower-costs-workloads/
Comparing this with AMD and Intel offerings is silly, because you cannot buy a chip from ARM. They simply design the cores (and many manufacturers don't even use their reference implementations - only the ISA). There is nothing really magical about ARM except that if you are wanting to build your own processor you might as well use them because licenses are pretty cheap, there is a large range of support tools available for them, and they incorporate many of the latest features in their designs with little historical cruft attached. It also helps to have a licensor who will happily work with you on your design to reach what ever objectives you're after rather than unleash the lawyers on you.
In other words, they are an excellent place to start, the alternatives aren't that great, and there is little point rolling your own ISA unless you've discovered something pretty incredible.