Online retail giant Amazon will soon sell its own brand of silicon on its digital storefront.
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Amazon purchased the semiconductor firm Annapurna Labs past year, and now its readied a line of chips under the name Alpine for sale. “Our recently announced ReadyNAS 214 is based on Annapurna’s Alpine quad-core and packs in a rich set of services including PLEX media server with live transcoding capabilities, a private cloud for the home, 5 levels of security and a seamless backup solution for all connected devices”.
“The categories Annapurna is focusing on – home networking devices, and NAS storage controller and subsystem platform-on-chip solutions like video streaming, app virtualization, cloud functions and IoT – are areas that require relatively simple designs for chips that sell in high volumes”, King said. Interestingly, Intel Corporation hasn’t made much use of ARM’s technology in its most profitable market niche, and has remained largely focused on the segment of server chips by retaining its 99% share in it. The largest global e-commerce retailer sealed the deal with Annapurna Labs for the sum of $350 million.
An Israeli company acquired by Amazon past year has announced a new line of semiconductors, marking Amazon’s first foray into the chip making market. With Amazon Echos under the Christmas tree in many a Middle American home last month, the day when every consumer connects to the company directly may not be far off.
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Amazon and its subsidiary want to deliver “a high-performance platform”, which its clients can use when building the type of hardware that meets consumer demands. The chips come with various connectivity options and up to four processors. Intel is the world’s biggest supplier of PC chips and continues to command the market for data center computing, while ARM has a strong hold over the mobile market. Annapurna officials said that a number of tech vendors already are using the company’s chip technology, including Asus, Netgear, Synology and QNAP Systems. The partnership will be shipping out processors to other OEMs and service providers as of this week.
