Enjoyment: Structure News: ARMing up: When will AWS make its own processors?

Friday, 8 January 2016

Structure News: ARMing up: When will AWS make its own processors?

Where We Totally Design All Our Chips Ourselves

January 8th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit

This week, we'll talk about how much Google paid to get Diane Greene on its side, Apple's continued interest in AI startups, and whether Amazon Web Services will finally get the ARM server off the ground one of these days.

STRUCTURE NEWS

EMC CONSIDERS A BUYOUT BY ITS OWN SUBSIDIARY VMWARE

Happy New Year! We're getting ready for our first show of 2016, Structure Data, which will be held March 9th and 10th at our old familiar home, UCSF Mission Bay. This week Derrick Harris put together a bit of a preview, highlighting some major themes we plan to cover and the already-amazing lineup of speakers (such as Josh Wills of Slack, pictured here in the biggest hat ever used in a Structure speaker photo) we'll have attending.

Derrick's preview is here. More information about the show can be found here, and you can register here.

INDUSTRY NEWS

GOOGLE PAID $380M TO BUY BEBOP, EXECUTIVE DIANE GREENE DONATING HER $148M SHARE

There are acquihires, and then there are acquihires. Google's move to bring in Diane Greene to run its cloud group didn't come cheap: the company revealed in an SEC filing spotted by Venturebeat that it paid $380 million for Greene's startup (which nobody seems to know all that much about) and that Greene will be giving her cut of the sale to "a donor advised fund."

APPLE BUYS ARTIFICIAL-INTELLGENCE STARTUP EMOTIENT

Apple continues to invest in artificial intelligence, snapping its third AI startup in recent months with this week's purchase of Emotient, as reported by the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Emotient seems to have been working on image and facial recognition technology, which could have several applications in iPhones, Apple TV, or the gleaming aluminum car they're going to release one of these days.

WATCH WHAT YOU DO WITH THAT BIG DATA, FTC WARNS BUSINESSES

The Federal Trade Commission released a new report on data collection practices this week that doesn't really move the needle on data and privacy, but shows the government is watching the development of this space to some degree. As reported by IDG News Service, the report lays out some basic guidelines, but doesn't go quite as far as the ACLU, which called for "systems for auditing the proprietary algorithms," a notion I'm sure will play well in Silicon Valley.

UNDER NEW CEO, SISENSE RAISES $50M

While some tech watchers are fretting over the slowdown in overall startup funding expected in 2016, good ideas still get the money. Sisense has raised another $50 million in a Series D round to further its development of its data analysis tools, according to a WSJ blog post.

VERIZON LAUNCHES AUCTION TO SELL DATA CENTERS: SOURCES

Somebody might be primed for an interesting move in the public cloud market. Verizon has decided it's time to get out of the data center business and focus on its core strengths, such as making incessant commercials for its wireless service. Reuters reports that the company has put 48 data centers up for auction, which could be an interesting purchase for a company looking to get into the public cloud market or bolster their existing services.

IBM'S SOFTWARE GURU IS CALLING IT QUITS

After quite a career inside one of the tech industry's legendary companies, IBM's Steve Mills has decided to retire. Fortune has a nice writeup of the formidable impact Mills had in unifying IBM's software development processes and pushing it to adopt then-controversial (internally, anyway) technologies like open-source software.

BIG PICTURE

Over the years at Gigaom, we were convinced Amazon was working on designing its own ARM-based chips for its cloud services. We could never quite nail it down, probably because these were skunkworks-type projects, but in talking to enough people and seeing a general trend in computing around designing chips for custom workloads, we were pretty sure Amazon (like Google, Facebook (a Facebook server design pictured above) and others) had a side chip project just in case it got frustrated by (or tired of) Intel.

Where there's smoke, there's generally fire, and Annapurna Labs, an Amazon subsidiary quietly acquired last year, announced this week it has developed a line of ARM-based processors for several different applications, including cloud services. A few companies, including Netgear and QNAP, are already using the chips in their products. Bloomberg notes that these types of chips aren't really competitive against the chips that go into the servers that power Amazon's cloud (and retail unit, probably), so this isn't a development that has Intel all freaked out.

Still, Bloomberg also points out that AWS has been "hiring semiconductor engineers to add to its own capabilities and is increasingly seeking to design or tweak its own hardware." As the public cloud market continues to evolve, and AWS continues to print money for Amazon, could ARM-based processors finally find their way into the data center?

Notions that ARM would be able to replicate its success in the smartphone world with an entry into enterprise computing processors have gone absolutely nowhere. Intel's Diane Bryant told attendees at Structure 2015 that Intel has 96 percent market share in server computing, and that's probably a conservative number.

But if companies like Amazon and Google do manage to design competitive products, it could significantly impact the next era of cloud computing. They could offer specific services based on unique workloads that Intel may not always be able to serve (although Intel's customizable Xeon chip is coming out this quarter). It could change the economics of the market. And it could spur Intel to come up with better products of its own in response, lifting everybody's sails.

There are still so many companies that have yet to move workloads to the cloud. A little competition for those workloads should make things interesting.