It feels like Google has been directing their in-house designs on ML/TPUs while Amazon went all in on ARM. It will be interesting to see how those bets pay off.
No, but Microsoft bought some off the shelf Ampere and Cavium/Marvell servers. But they keep them for internal use only for now :(
Huawei makes their own silicon and servers with that silicon — also only internal, not available on huaweicloud :(
The only other player is Scaleway who bought first gen Cavium ThunderX's way back when. And Packet of course but that's bare metal only, no cheap small VPSes.
Huawei Cloud does have Kunpeng ARM servers available in some AZ (at least I know Bangkok AZ2 has some). They also run managed Redis on ARM so cheap that it will cost more to run it yourself on Intel VM.
I'm excited to see the price drop when Elasticache moves to ARM.
If they are good enough for internal use, they should be good enough for public use. Not really sure what is stopping them from exposing it to the public... I am sure there is _some_ demand for it.
There are a number of reasons not to launch as an external cloud offering. A few:
- Reliability (performance and availability) could be below Azure standards
- Supply chain maturity - they may have difficulty scaling procurement and deployment to meet orders
- Lock in - major cloud providers typically provide product guarantees with forenotice on the order of years before a deprecation. It's a big commitment to launch a product externally.
- Business case - maybe the TCO doesn't make sense when compared with Azure's data on demand and price point
No, but they've been working closely with Qualcomm since the Windows Phone 7 days (10 years ago). Their recent Surface Pro X runs a customized Snapdragon 8cx dubbed "Microsoft SQ1".
It feels like Google has been directing their in-house designs on ML/TPUs while Amazon went all in on ARM. It will be interesting to see how those bets pay off.