Amazon’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’s technology are encroaching on Intel and Advanced Micro Devices 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 (roughly Rs. 2,93,600 crores) takeover by Nvidia.
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.