Amazon Has Just Become A Chip Maker

While the Seattle-based Web retailer is a storefront for merchandise from a plethora of manufacturers, it has branched out to offer commoditized products under its own brand.

Amazon’s Annapurna Labs’ chips are custom created to support high performance networking. The chip is now used by ASUS, Synology, and Netgear, and it has a vast potential for use in different markets. Alpine is backed by a vast portfolio of digital architectures and platforms alongside an inclusive set of peripheral computing devices.

Amazon’s first chips will be of the 32-bit ARMv7 or 64-bit ARMv8 variety and are intended for use in smaller devices like network routers, media streaming devices, secure storage, and Internet of Things home devices.

Annapurna has been providing Alpine chips to several customers but now wants to go for a wider market which is why it’s making marketing noises about its products.

The Wall Street Journal reported Amazon paid about $350 million for Annapurna last January, citing unnamed sources.

Rumors from previous year pointed out that Amazon was planning to stop using chips from Intel, replacing them with the less power-intensive ARM chips.

Amazon has been in the hardware market for a while, but on the consumer end of things; the company sells Amazon-branded items through its online store, and has smartphones and tablets for sale. “To stay competitive, OEMs and service providers … need to quickly add support for the new features that give consumers the ability to enjoy the latest applications without changing hardware or waiting for months to get updated software”, Annapurna Vice President Gary Szilagyi said in a statement.

It’s possible that Amazon plans to use Annapurna products in some of the hardware it sells, like the Amazon Echo or the Kindle. For those tasks, though, they sound more than up to the task, with up to four processors and a bunch of connectivity options. 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. The partnership will be shipping out processors to other OEMs and service providers as of this week.