My Sunday thought muse: What impact, if any, would the new Apple M1 chip architecture have on the existing heavily invested Intel/AMD cloud provider infrastructures over the mid to long term? From early reports the M1 chip is causing a stir due to its balanced approach to computation throughput verses watt performance and cost. Or will the M1 be limited to the home computing environment?
Now its too early to predict to any certainty answers to the above questions but those big power hungry cloud infrastructures are looking somewhat over leveraged in legacy technology. How will the cloud providers integrate/replace these power hungry chip architectures with an environmental sympathetic compute model? I am discounting the optimised compute utilisation model as its applicable to any architecture. Their narrative “let us host and run your platform as we can do it cheaper than yourselves” will become a centre point of senior executive discussion as the M1 performance groundswell increases and attention is focused on the “whats possible”.
In short does anyone see Apple launching its own cloud services, similar to AWS and GCP, at a highly discounted rate due to the scaled power efficiencies the new architecture provides? Back in May 2020 Forbes too were asking this question, https://www.forbes.com/sites/taarinikaurdang/2020/05/31/is-apple-planning-to-enter-cloud-computing-space/?sh=d0172a52d533, and now we starting to see an answer.