Amazon’s cloud unit taps own chips for new supercomputing offering
Dec 1 (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc’s cloud unit on Tuesday offered a new supercomputing service based on its self-designed processors, a further sign of how chips based on Arm Ltd’s technology are encroaching on Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc turf.
Amazon Web Services, or AWS, sells its computing services based on the customer’s choice of an underlying central processor chip. Software developers have traditionally chosen between Intel or AMD products, but since 2018 Amazon has also offered its own “Graviton” chips designed with technology from Arm, which is in the midst of a $40 billion takeover by Nvidia Corp.
Arm-based chips have long powered mobile phones because they can operate on very low power levels, but they are increasingly used in data centers where their power efficiency helps control costs. The world’s fastest computing system, the Fugaku supercomputer in Japan, is based on Arm chips.
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