Amazon, Apple Ditch Intel Chips, Causing Industry Change



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“Intel builds on more than 20 years of work on the x86 ecosystem,” said Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president of Intel. “We ensure software compatibility and high performance, important requirements for consumers and data center customers.”

Amazon also continues to expand its use of Intel chips for some work. It announced a plan on Tuesday to run Intel-equipped Mac minicomputers in its data centers to help programmers develop software for Apple systems without using Apple hardware.

But Arm is increasingly competitive in IT, said René Haas, president of Arm’s main product group. He said that Arm made key changes to improve the compute performance of each processor core or the individual compute engines laid out on each piece of silicon.

Cloud-like computing tasks can also better exploit many relatively simple cores and special circuits, Amazon’s DeSantis said. Its Arm-based chip, called Graviton2, has 64 such cores, compared to up to 24 more powerful cores on Intel server chips, he said. This helps him perform computer tasks that are performed simultaneously, such as serving web pages to different people.

Ampere, a chip start-up in Santa Clara, Calif., Has developed an 80-core Arm server chip and plans to release a 128-core version next year. Renée James, CEO of Ampère, said her clients and investors include software giant Oracle, which plans to offer a cloud computing service based on Ampère’s chips.

Arm “is real with Amazon,” Ms. James said. “Their competitors will follow.”

Gerard Williams III, chief executive of Nuvia, another start-up promoting Arm-based chips, said Arm supporters have benefited as well, as Intel has lost its head in manufacturing innovations that allow chips to be do more for less. Chip producers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung Electronics can now integrate more functions on each wafer of silicon, which means Arm chip designers who use them can gain speed advantages.

Change manifests itself in many forms of calculus. In laptops, research firm Gartner predicted that Apple’s new Macs and rivals’ responses would take Arm-equipped PCs to 13.5 percent of the market by 2024, from 1.1 % this year.

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