Amazon buys secretive chip maker Annapurna Labs for $350M

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/198140-amazon-buys-secretive-chip-maker-annapurna-labs-for-350-million

by DiabloD3 • 12 years ago

45 21 12 years ago

With the number of servers Amazon has powering AWS, etc. maybe it's worth their while to buy a chipmaker and design custom chips to keep things going? I have no idea why Amazon would need a chipmaker otherwise.

DiabloD33• 12 years ago

You mean besides their e-reader, tablet, phone, media device, and whatever-the-hell-the-Echo-is product lines?

duaneb• 12 years ago

In general, CPUs are definitely not the problem with those devices.... it's the terrible software and tiny app store.

wmf2• 12 years ago

It could also be for the Fire Router and Fire NAS.

dangrossman• 12 years ago

Speculation about future products aside, Amazon already has custom designed routers manufactured for them to run AWS. They already have Intel selling them custom CPU variants that aren't sold on the open market.

discodave2• 12 years ago

Some data points:

From a Forbes article: "AWS sees networking as the critical path for cloud but also realizes that the relative cost of networking increases as server and storage prices drop rapidly. Networking is, in Hamilton’s words, “frozen in time” as the vertically integrated ecosystems generate “indefensible profit margins”. AWS’ solution is to build a custom networking hardware and protocol stack and to own their own private long haul links."

from this Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/11/25/scale-beyond...

So Amazon is really really trying to reduce the cost of Networking.

From the extremetech article: "Analysts have pointed to server networking chips as Annapurna Labs’ main focus. These chips could be used to move data more efficiently and save power in data centers."

I think it's pretty clear why they are making this aquisition...

es09• 12 years ago

I doubt if reducing cost can be the only factor. Broadcom chips are going to be pretty much the lowest cost ones because of their scale. It's more likely that they are dreaming up some network architecture that isn't served well by existing solutions.

discodave2• 12 years ago

By lowest cost I didn't mean the actual cost of the chips but the cost of the whole architecture. As you point out, the best solution might require chips that can't be found off the shelf.

I guess the metric they're trying to optimize is cost/performance/watt or something like that.

stuntprogrammer2• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, the only public information I recall seeing was the use of a quad Cortex-A15 based SOC with integrated dual 10G in a NAS box.

However, the real capabilities of the product line were far more interesting, with very cool demos up and running with awesome metrics. The server possibilities are huge... especially if you provide opaque optimized services in a cloud to user workloads running on the x86 side.

newman314• 12 years ago

I was coming here to say this but can't talk more due to NDA.

However, I would say look at the capabilities as listed for Synology DS2015x and extropolate. I, for one, kind of wish that Annapurna remained independent for other uses outside of AWS.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8777/synologys-ds2015xs-brings...

"The SoC at the heart of the DS2015xs is the AL-514 from Annapurna Labs, an Israeli startup that is still in stealth mode. The company has declined to speak to the media as of now. However, tracing some coverage of Israeli VC firms reveals that Annapurna Labs was founded in 2011 with the intent of bringing ARM-based communication processors to the market. Datasheets of SoCs from Annapurna Labs are not currently available to the public, but Synology was kind enough to divulge the following details (which, I suspect, can be gleaned via SSH access to the DS2015xs):

The AL-514 has four ARM Cortex-A15 cores running at 1.7 GHz The Cortex-A15 cores are configured with LPAE (large physical address extension) that allows addressing of more than 4 GB of RAM (the DS2015xs supports up to 8 GB) The SoC has two 10G Ethernet MAC IPs integrated"

gonzo2• 12 years ago

Nothing here that can't be found in recent releases from Cavium, Broadcom and AMD.

Amazon buys secretive chip maker Annapurna Labs for $350M

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