I led the support for multi arch images for Borg.

Google had the software stack ready for internal workload longtime ago, PowerPC was used

https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/head...

I am sure the software is multi-arch ready but I wonder if they are evaluating ARM servers either for use internally or to launch in the cloud...

Does Microsoft make any of their own silicon?

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.

huh! I see now that they are mentioned on the Chinese Mainland website, but not on /intl.

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

> Does Microsoft make any of their own silicon?

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".

I wonder if it could help bringing ARM to Azure.

They did for Hololens 2.0 [0], so they have some expertise, but that's a different segment.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjxpMZUqu6c

Or they could make one themselves as well?

It is not like Google or Microsoft does not have the expertise in house for these task. The Core and Interconnect on Graviton2 are licensed from ARM based on Neoverse. It is Fabbed on TSMC 7nm.

While there are still a lot going on with customisation, I would not be surprised if ARM have have a few solution on hand already.

The cost advantage of fabbing its own CPU is so huge, it is only a matter of time Google or Microsoft make their own CPU to compete.

They could, and probably will... for 3 years and then sunset the product.

I'd considering x86 in their environment but never anything I can't immediately port somewhere else.

Stock ARM maybe. Anything boutique? Nope.

You can run the same binaries on Graviton as on other Arm server platforms from eg HP or Lenovo, in the same way that you can run x86 binaries on Intel or AMD processors.

I believe Amazon have subbed out manufacture to TSMC.

True, but the design is licensed from ARM and tuned to AWS's requirements.