Uber embraces the cloud with customized CPUs

Ampere is an ARM processor architecture licensee, and cloud service providers AWS, Google, and Microsoft have also customized ARM-based CPUs, notes Shane Rau, research vice president for computing semiconductors at IDC. It also may benefit cloud users to work with a semiconductor company such as Ampere to co-design CPUs, he says, adding that such a partnership would bring cloud customers the tools, relationships, and technology they need.

“Usually, companies that co-design a CPU with a semiconductor company have their own specific piece of IP and their own special set of workloads and customer types to support but they lack the capabilities to bring a product with that IP to the market,” Rau says.

Calculated route to the cloud

Uber’s cloud journey may sound familiar in some ways. The company, with a beta launch in mid-2010, chose to operate its own data centers because the modern cloud computing market was still in its infancy. AWS was less than a decade old, and Microsoft rebranded Azure, originally Windows Azure and about a half-decade old, just months before Uber’s beta launch.