Cloud providers are some of the biggest buyers of chips
because they rent out the computing power they generate to thousands of other
companies. Until recently, however, almost all the chips cloud services bought
came from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices because most business software is
written to run on those processors.
That began to change in 2018 when Amazon, the largest cloud
provider, announced a service using its own custom chip made with intellectual
property from Arm, the British firm whose technology already underlies most
smartphone chips and is steadily making its way into laptops and data centers
to challenge Intel and AMD.
Oracle on Tuesday joined the fray with chips from Ampere
Computing, the company founded by former Intel President Renee James, who also
sits on the board of Oracle. Oracle said it would rent out the chips at 1 cent
per computing core per hour, less than half of what it said were its rivals'
comparable rates.
"We're at an inflection point in the industry,” Clay
Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, told Reuters
in an interview. "Now that there's a very competitive Arm product, I view
my job as to offer my customers value and choice.”
Oracle also announced a range of initiatives to help expand
the amount of business software that runs on Arm chips, a move that could help
its rivals. Microsoft and Alphabet's Google do not yet offer Arm-based cloud
services to the public, but Magouyrk said he expects they will - and that all
cloud customers will eventually benefit from the competition.
"We'll be ahead of them in that regard, but I also
think they'll have Arm offerings and they'll be highly competitive. I view this
is a multi-year process where Arm becomes ubiquitous on the server,"
Magouyrk said.
© Reuters
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