Marketing CPUs in a Multi-Polar World
How do CPU companies market in a newly, highly-fragmented market? There are no easy answers in this very complex, rapidly moving environment, but there is some hope.
How do CPU companies market in a newly, highly-fragmented market? There are no easy answers in this very complex, rapidly moving environment, but there is some hope.
There are really three markets for AI semis – training, cloud inference and edge inference. All of them are already fairly crowded. Choose your battles carefully.
Less than a decade ago, CPUs were the dominant form of compute and everyone ‘knew’ the market could only support two vendors. Today, there are over a dozen companies making CPUs.
The Cloud Vendors continue to push hard to win business running the Telco’s core networks. Azure now claims they can reduce carrier opex by 40%. If true, this will push a lot of operators into the warm embrace of the Cloud.
We think there will be a few more legs of semis consolidation. So we compiled a list of 5 semis companies who we think will survive:
1. ADI & TI
2. QCOM
3. NVDA
4. Some chip company from China
5. The smoldering remains of Intel, probably owned by others.
AWS cannot control the software it runs, but it can still benefit from having its own CPU by reducing power consumption and thus increasing capacity of its data centers. And maybe that also introduces a new form of customer lock-in.
A recap of our emerging thesis on the changing nature of compute and what that means for semis companies large and small.
Fifty years ago the Street fell in love with diverse conglomerates like Gulf + Western. How different are the sprawling operations of the major Internet companies today?
There is a real chance that AWS’s purchase of semis may decline year-on-year in the second half as they, like everyone else, moderates pandemic spending. Not a cause for panic, but worth remembering that we tend to take data center growth for granted.
Software company Red Panda did an in-depth analysis of Graviton’s Arm-based server CPU, and demonstrates that Arm is starting to look very strong in the data center.