Amazon is designing a new data center chip

Η Amazon, as it has been heard lately, has created a powerful processor for use in data centers, as the company's cloud computing segment appears to be slowly moving away from chipsets makers, such as Intel and AMD.

The new AWS processor uses technology Arm and as sources who know the subject better say, will be 20 times faster than its predecessor, Graviton, which was released a year ago and also uses Arm technology.

So far the market cloud computing It is dominated by Intel and AMD, with the former controlling more than 90% of the processor market, while the latter controlling for the largest share.

However, many chip companies and designers are currently trying to adapt Arm chips, which are currently used on mobiles, so that they can be used in data centers as well.

Disruption to the market for data centers

The first chip made by Amazon did not affect Intel's data center market. However, analyst Stacy Rasgon believes that with the right design, the Arm could be a challenge: “As for the Arm itself, I'm not worried, but the Arm in the hands of Amazon or Google, which could potentially invest in it, then it becomes more problematic. ”

According to sources, the company's new chip is not expected to be as powerful as its Cascade Lake Intel or AMD Rome chips.

The previous Amazon Graviton chip used Arm's Cortex A72 technology, but the new chip will probably use the company's Neoverse N1 technology. Also according to Reuters, the chip is expected to have at least 32 cores. The new chip will also use a technology called "fabric" that will allow it to connect to other chips to help speed up difficult processes such as image recognition.

One obstacle, however, to the adoption of Arm chips in data centers is the fact that customers will most likely have to use software written specifically for Arm chips and this is much less common than software developed for Intel and AMD chips.