It kinda makes sense though, ARM has been creeping upwards over the years and yet afaik outside of Ampere no ARM server supplier has become serious (outside of inhouse variants such as Amazon Graviton).

So combining ARM and Ampere operations doesn't hurt any current big customers in the mobile field (apart from perhaps Qualcomm but they're in lawsuit mode there anyhow).

They also make sure to make the ARM alternative available to smaller customers (As an option besides AMD and Intel servers) instead of being gobbled up by f.ex. Oracle (making the big server ARM implementations inhouse to 2 of the big platform operators).

Not to mention the silver lining, combining the ops will give it more credence in the enterprise market that seems to have damn good margins (some have attributed AMD's resurgence and Intel's troubles to Intel slipping in server sales).

Largely agree. Arm / Softbank is in a tricky place if there are no credible customers in a given market. Does it just sit on its hands or actually get out there and build some chips! It has helped fund or help some startups that were using Arm designs to get into new markets (eg Annapurna Labs) but sometimes that doesn't work out at all (Nuvia!)

And to be fair I think Rene Haas has been fairly upfront about changing their approach.

Kind of like Nvidia selling GPUs and also offering cloud GPU services?

Somewhat but not competing with its customers has been a central part of Arm's proposition for three decades, for good reason. There are at least a lot of competitors for Nvidia's design. Your options if you want to build a server core are a lot more limited.

> Kind of like Nvidia selling GPUs and also offering cloud GPU services?

Different in that ARM only 'designed'. It's more like a framework / library / tool (a very feature complete 1).

The Nvidia case is more similar to having a self-install and then a cloud hosted version of the same software.

Isn’t Ampere essentially the only company making server grade ARM chips.

And all the rest of ARM customers are making mobile/desktop.

So Ampere is going after a completely different segment that the rest of ARM customers aren’t addressing.

They're the only company selling server grade ARM chips but others are rolling their own for internal use, such as Amazons Graviton line. That's Ampere's problem really, their biggest potential customers are so big that they can afford to cut out middlemen like Ampere.

Even if Ampere could afford to undercut the internal development of these hyperscalar ARM chips (which to my knowledge they cannot), there is more value in in-housing ARM chips like Amazon / Microsoft are doing: you can more easily try out wacky ideas in chip / firmware design.

Often times these companies might have an idea for how to save power / tweak cores in a weird way on a CPU, but have a chicken-and-egg problem with not knowing exactly how much it'll reduce COGS. Not knowing that and having to negotiate with a vendor (who will often want to charge more for the feature) means that it's difficult to do unless it's an obvious slam-dunk.

By bringing chip development in-house, adding new features skews more towards a political decision that requires less rigorous financial calculations (e.g. "how much power will this save relative to the vendor_cost++ and our own developer cost?" for 3rd-party chips). It basically allows these cloud providers to ship new features more quickly in their CPUs.

Yeah and you can solve exactly your problems without worrying about anyone else.

Yeah, Ampere's only customers appear to be Oracle Cloud and some hobbyists. I was kind of expecting Oracle to buy them.

Hetzner offers Ampere boxes too, but they're not exactly a hyperscaler.

++ ScaleWay has Ampere ARM too

I use Hetzner ARM machines myself and they're great, and something something i THINK there's less abuse and noisy neighbors on ARM since it's slightly less skiddie friendly (can't run random x86 binaries)

Azure also has Ampere, and they're used a good amount in Telco.

Mikrotik some how got a hold of Graviton cpu's for their Flagship router and now their new NAS/Router/Container Server.

https://mikrotik.com/product/rds2216

Interesting enough Mikrotik announced a co-development with Ampere last year. https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/blog/2024/09/24/27...

Interesting... that AL73400 part they're using is the first generation Graviton, and AFAICT that's not available on AWS anymore. Maybe Amazon considers it obsolete and is selling their stocks off to third parties like MikroTik?

Isn't Marvell/Cavium still in the ARM server business, too?

Not since 2020: https://www.networkworld.com/article/969117/marvell-exits-th...

Nvidia is making arm server cpus.

Ampere is the only one with a license to make server-grade ARM chips.

There's a distinction that has to be made here.

Isn't Arm now venturing into the product, rather than just specification, market and so this acquisition could help Arm?