Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says

Re:Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says by st3fan on Monday October 15, 2012 @10:59AM (#4655320)

This is awesome. I'll have a cheaper ARM-based EC2 host please.

Has anyone considered that this could also be for ARM-based servers instead of just Kindles? :-)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says by eli on Monday October 15, 2012 @12:33PM (#4655796)

I could be wrong, but I think this is only talking about TI's mobile baseband chips, not ARM processors.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says by mtdev on Monday October 15, 2012 @01:00PM (#4655950)

If they are referring to TI's OMAP processors, then they typically feature multiple ARM cores with various media accelerators (http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/swpt034b/swpt034b.pdf). These are like all-in-one chips designed for mobile platforms that are optimized for displaying media on a LCD-ish display at minimum power. The OMAP offerings are pretty similar to chips from Broadcom or Samsung, however, it makes sense for them to get integrated with their biggest customer. They already have NDAs in place and TI probably has field engineers that essentially work for Amazon, they would just be transferring financial stake different production processes.

Having said that, the reason that you probably don't want to run a EC2 instance on an OMAP, or any ARM for that matter, is because they are not 64bit compatible, they do not have good virtualization support, and you would not be taking advantage of various media/display capability.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says by eli on Monday October 15, 2012 @08:18PM (#4657789)

Well, it's a very poorly sourced article, but TI has been trying to unload its old baseband mobile chip division so it could focus on OMAP 4.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says by st3fan on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @04:18PM (#4661628)

They bought the company, not a specific type of chip. They can do whatever they want and steer this in any direction they want.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says by ruchirablog on Monday October 15, 2012 @11:18AM (#4655412)

arggg really dude? I dont want my web site on that please!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says by freehunter on Monday October 15, 2012 @11:36AM (#4655495)

Is there anything inherently wrong with ARM servers that give you legitimate reason to immediately balk at the suggestion? As far as I can tell, ARM servers are no less reliable or speedy as x86 servers. They just cost less to own and run. In fact, there's already a sizable precedence of ARM server clusters like EC2 (and including EC2). See:

[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/download/arm

[2] http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Canonical-releases-EC...

[3] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/your-v...

[4] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5N...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says by ruchirablog on Monday October 15, 2012 @11:57AM (#4655624)

Yes this argument is becoming true with time because ARM is really gaining phase. But we have Virtualization and its already cheap and works best at the moment. I dont see why anyone should go for separate ARM server ( in normal scenarios of course ) instead of using virtualization

[ Parent | on HN ]