Tuesday, 29 April 2014

Is Amazon looking to make its own hardware?

Job listings show that the retail giant is hiring former Calxeda engineers.


Amazon may be the latest organization looking to make custom hardware. The retail giant has hired several engineers who used to work at Calxeda and has job postings on its site that call for microprocessor design expertise.

A look through LinkedIn listings suggest that former Calxeda engineers who made the switch to Amazon have job titles that clearly suggest that Amazon is looking to get into the hardware game. The job titles include Principal Engineer, Silicon Optimization at Amazon Web Services; Hardware Development Engineer; Hardware Design Engineer; Director of Silicon Optimizations at Amazon Web Services; and Manager of Hardware Engineering, Silicon Optimizations at Amazon Web Services.

Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, believes*that an organization would need a CPU architect only if it were looking to make its own custom hardware. If so, Amazon will be the latest organization to secure an ARM license and build its own hardware. However, Moorhead said that investing in creating a hardware infrastructure was a risky bet.

“It is a major investment in the hundreds of millions of dollars to build your own custom core but if you buy hardware like Amazon does, and if you are truly successful at matching your workloads to your processors, then it could pay off. But it’s very risky,” he is quoted as saying to*Gigaom.

Google and Facebook already make their own hardware, and it looks like Amazon will follow suit soon.

Source: Gigaom



Read More: http://ift.tt/1m6aNGJ





via Hardware Forums http://ift.tt/1nBP9cW

No comments:

Post a Comment