- Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) Annapurna Labs chip unit, acquired a year ago for a reported $350M, has unveiled (amid CES) a set of 32-bit and 64-bit ARM-based (ARMH) processors for home gateways, Wi-Fi routers, and NAS storage appliances, along with related subsystems.
- The chips, to be sold under the Alpine label, target a low-end networking/storage processor market in which Marvell (MRVL), Cavium (CAVM), Intel (INTC), and Broadcom (BRCM) are notable players. Annapurna suggests the Alpine line will be differentiated in part by offering superior general-purpose computing power, thus allowing it to support more higher-level services. It also promises Alpine will support 4K video streaming 10G Ethernet and PCIe Gen3 connectivity, low power consumption, and enterprise-class reliability.
- Asus and Netgear plan to use Alpine. To date, Amazon has been tight-lipped about its plans for Annapurna. There has been speculation the Israeli chipmaker will develop low-power ARM server CPUs that will go into AWS' data centers. For now, AWS continues relying on Intel's x86 server CPUs.
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