Article says Amazon accounts for >50% while China accounts for 40%, so Amazon actually has >80% outside China. I wonder why Microsoft and Google aren’t as eager to stop paying the x86 tax.
They are but it takes 2 to 3 years to develop a chip like this. Someone already posted a link to the Google chip. Microsoft got a lot of CPU designers from Qualcomm's team after Qualcomm got rid of them a few years ago. Now Microsoft has laid off their custom ARM core team so anything they do will be a licensed ARM core.
Three. Two operated by other companies (in Beijing and Ningxia) that are only available in China, and Hong Kong which appears to be just another AWS region available globally.
Microsoft has been abysmally slow to move towards ARM. They hitched their wagon to Qualcomm and snapdragon... which does not seem like a smart decision now (especially as Qualcomm seems to be moving to RISC-V lol). Windows on ARM for servers has been a bit of a pipe dream and joke--I think they finally have it available but I stopped looking or caring about it years ago. Amazon is the defacto ARM in the cloud/server leader right now and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
>which does not seem like a smart decision now (especially as Qualcomm seems to be moving to RISC-V lol).
I politely disagree. We know for a fact, from December's RISC-V Summit, that Microsoft is influencing RISC-V to ease the burden on their own Windows for RISC-V effort.
Qualcomm was a partner for ARM, and they are already used to working with them. They will likely be partners again, with RISC-V devices this time around.
And Windows for ARM will go the same way as Windows for Alpha. Just an historical footnote.
Why? Some people here seem to be weirdly obsessed with RISC-V when it's likely to end up being even more closed/proprietary than ARM (at least on the high-end). Why would you give away your competitive advantage to everyone else by licensing your core designs?
ARM at least provides more or less an even playing field to everyone. It's much cheaper for competitors to catch-up with Gravitron since they can just license the exactly same core it's built on. If it was a RISC-V CPU and as much ahead it would be way easier for AWS to maintain it's moat.
