UPDATED 23:26 EST / JANUARY 07 2016

NEWS

Amazon debuts ARM-based chips for the Internet of Things

Amazon.com, Inc., is making a play for a piece of the smart home market with the launch of a new line of semiconductors. The chips will be sold to smart home product designers building Wi-Fi router, Internet of Things devices and other smart home appliances.

Amazon’s chips are built by its Israeli subsidiary Annapurna Labs, a company it snapped up last year for a price tag of around $350 million. The company said its Alpine line of ARM-based processors are now on sale for a wide range of applications.

The company said its chips are based on the same ARM technology that’s used to power most smartphones in the world today. The Alpine chips will come packed with up to four processors and sport an array of networking technology, which will boost the performance of smart home gadgets and routers that are currently held back by low computing power.

As Bloomberg notes, the Alpine chips are geared towards low power devices for storage and marketing, which means they’re not really designed to take on Intel’s high-powered chips in the PC and server markets.

That’s not to say Amazon won’t emerge as a thorn in Intel’s side. Although Intel’s chips dominate the PC and the data center, Intel has been struggling to break into the mobile device market with its non-ARM chips for years. Unfortunately for Intel it hasn’t yet succeeded, and with Amazon now among its competitors it looks even less likely to do so.

Annapurna said that companies including Netgear and Synology are already using its chips on a range of low-powered devices to handle encryption, media processing and other multi-core processing tasks.

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