Amazon is said to be working on custom silicon chips for its hardware network switches in order to further improve the internal infrastructure of the company.
Amazon building the switches from the very core is said to solve the company’s infrastructure issues, especially if it’s custom-built. Amazon already builds its own switches, but it’s reliant on Broadcom for the silicon that powers them. It makes sense for the company to want to completely control those machines and further be independent of any other respective resources. Through this, it is expected that Amazon could even offer some services which it wasn’t able to offer before, now powered by the new switches. According to The Information, the machine learning software that Amazon offers currently runs on Annapurna chips.
Though it is to be noted that these switches are not actually Amazon’s first custom silicon product as the company has previously worked with MediaTek to develop a chip for its Echo smart speaker product which was further designed to make Alexa respond faster. Moreover, it also has custom machine learning chips called ‘Trainium’ which will soon become available to consumers soon.
It is to be expected that Microsoft and Google will slowly follow along to keep up the pace with Amazon.
Source: The Verge
