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Re:SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B by _huayra_ on Thursday March 20, 2025 @11:11AM (#43424493)
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.

Re:SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B by IshKebab on Thursday March 20, 2025 @06:35PM (#43429823)
Yeah and you can solve exactly your problems without worrying about anyone else.