Amazon starts selling its own ARM chips

Amazon has started selling its own ARM chips, primarily aimed at OEMs, and for use in routers and network storage. The maker of the chips is the Israeli Annapurna Labs, which was acquired by Amazon a year ago for the equivalent of 320 million euros.

The chips, which bear the name ‘Alpine’, are intended to be sold to OEMs and makers of Wi-Fi routers and network storage systems. According to the press release, the current generation of these devices is too limited in network and computing capabilities. Amazon wants to remove these limitations with the new chips, which should support DDR4 memory and PCIe 3.0, among other things.

According to Gary Szilagyi, CEO of Annapurna, founded in 2011, “the number of applications and user requirements in the home market continues to grow rapidly.” That is why makers would need a chip that they can build on for a longer period of time. According to Bloomberg, the chips do not threaten Intel’s dominant position in the server chip market. It is also unclear whether Amazon will use the Alpine chips for internal use.

In addition to compatibility with Data Plane Development Kit and OpenWRT, Annapurna also says it offers support for Linux and OpenBSD. Synology and Netgear, among others, have been using the chips manufactured by the Israeli company for some time. In 2014, the rumor came out that Amazon is interested in manufacturing its own chips.