Presumably Apple will build new data centers using Apple Silicon. This would be most disruptive to Intel but deeply affects Microsoft and Amazon.
Given what we know about compute to power consumption in the M1 and Apple’s track record of performance gains, how could Amazon or Microsoft compute not be under serious threat?
Apple wouldn’t sell server hardware to these companies.
While Amazon has been working on Gravitron2 from what I understand, the cores seriously underperform what is shipping in M1, and there is no evidence of serious work in this area from Microsoft.
The way I see it, compute is a commodity. On such things, you compete on price. Apple, in its current incarnation simply does not compete on price and refuses to do so. So how would they be a threat?
Because Apple would be selling to themselves. There is no markup, and the chips could be sold into consumer machines as well. This would allow scaled costs because production can be both for data centers and consumer products simultaneously.
X86 not only suffers from poor performance / power / thermal each chip sold has to return for Intel or AMD too.
The facilities that run these machines must be bigger, provide more power and work harder to keep cool while resulting in less actual compute.
It’s hard to compete on price when the architecture is unexpectedly antiquated and vertical integration through chip design either doesn’t exist or is pales in comparison.
Given what we know about compute to power consumption in the M1 and Apple’s track record of performance gains, how could Amazon or Microsoft compute not be under serious threat?
Apple wouldn’t sell server hardware to these companies.
While Amazon has been working on Gravitron2 from what I understand, the cores seriously underperform what is shipping in M1, and there is no evidence of serious work in this area from Microsoft.