Amazon's custom graviton arm processor is almost an amd deal

Since the launch of Zen, AMD has been able to compete with Intel in the x86 server market, but Amazon was unwilling to bet on AMD alone. So Amazon invested in Graviton ARM, hoping to compete with Intel with its homegrown chip offerings.

The Opteron A1100 was the basis of Amazon's Graviton ARM processor

Amazon's Graviton ARM processor is an effort not to depend on Intel, a sixteen-core processor that is based on ARM Cortex-A72 processing cores with a clock speed of 2.3 GHz. The only real downside is that the Cortex-A72 is primarily designed for high-end smartphones, making it unlikely to be competitive with any of the high-end x86 products.

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The Register has shed some light on Amazon's older ARM server plans, its sources claiming that AMD's ARM-based Opteron A1100 series processors were specifically designed for Amazon's cloud efforts. These plans were never met, and AMD failed to meet all of the performance milestones Amazon set.

AMD's Opteron A1100 was revealed in early 2016 and featured up to eight Cortex-A57 CPU cores, making it significantly weaker than Amazon's Graviton ARM processors. Amazon's ARM processors come from Annapurna Labs, which were acquired by Amazon in 2015. Amazon's custom Graviton ARM processor is almost AMD's ARM-based Opteron A1100 processor.

Now, the emergence of AMD's Zen-based EPYC processors that offer the cloud computing giant a great opportunity to lessen its dependence on Intel. Amazon is already offering cheaper AWS instances to customers when they use AMD's EPYC series processors, showing the benefits of a competitive market in the world of server CPUs.

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