Amazon may be designing its own ARM server chips

Amazon has been in the business of selling web services for years. In fact, large swaths of the internet run on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The hardware backing these servers has been generic thus far, but Amazon is now reportedly planning to design its own server chips based on the ARM architecture. This could allow Amazon to get the performance it needs out of a server at significantly reduced cost.
The retail giant has already hired a few chip engineers from a now-defunct Austin-based chip company called Calxeda. This, combined with new job postings, makes it look very much like Amazon is planning to start designing its own custom silicon in the way Nvidia and Qualcomm do. That would mean getting an ARM instruction set license and creating server CPUs based on ARM technology.
It’s unlikely Amazon’s hypothetical ARM chip clusters could outperform Intel server chips in terms of raw computing power, but they would be considerably more power efficient and easier to run in a massively distributed manner. Amazon already knows that it can save as much as 30% building and maintaining its own server infrastructure, so maybe building the chips in those servers could be the next step.
If Amazon goes through with this, it will probably be working with ARMv8, which has 64-bit support. Designing its own cores would mean an alternative to ARM’s own Cortex design, which is best suited for mobile devices anyway. Amazon would have the luxury of designing these chips to work with its specific hardware configurations. It could also wring more power out of ARM when not constrained by a mobile device’s power envelope.
Amazon is remaining understandably silent on the matter. It’s possible this isn’t about designing ARM cores, but maybe something about optimizing ARM designs for use in Amazon mobile devices like the Kindle Fire tablets. If it is looking toward custom ARM servers, it might be a few years until we know for sure.