Compute has become boring. A necessity with none of the glitz surrounding machine learning, artificial intelligence, or other trending technologies. That doesn’t mean processors aren’t as important as ever, but it does mean a shift in the market as licensing compute makes creating custom hardware a much cheaper and more accessible possibility than investing in traditional microprocessor design.

Potentially signaling the start of a new trend, cloud-computing giant Amazon recently announced the new EC2 A1 Instances powered by Amazon Web Services Graviton processors, built on designs licensed from Arm Ltd.

“I don’t know what Amazon plans to do, but if I had a crystal ball, I would say … this is the beginning of a journey, and now they will have the ability to integrate some very interesting and novel hardware advances of their own,” said Jon Masters (pictured), computer architect, chief Arm architect, and distinguished engineer at Red Hat Inc.

Masters spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd; during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Arm-based architecture. (* Disclosure below.)

Red Hat anticipated Arm entering mainstream server market

Amazon created Graviton by licensing a design from Arm Holdings Inc. for the core inside the processor and building the chip themselves. The company then contracted out to a foundry, manufactured and deployed the processors. “… And then, surprise! Now we have Arm-based instances,” Masters said.

Masters is a fan of Arm, forecasting that it would enter mainstream server play back in 2010, when he encouraged Red Hat to start developing for the architecture. His vision was to create a level of standardization that would be compatible with mainstream operating software and servers.

After many years in development preview status, the November 2017 release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 introduced support for Arm servers, and the current beta-release of RHEL 8 supports Arm in equal importance to other architectures and will remain so going forward, according to Masters.

This is in line with Red Hat’s equal opportunity multi-architecture strategy, which aims to support whatever customers want to adopt. “We don’t pick winners and losers,” Masters said. “The rule for our developers is, whenever they make a change, it has to run on all the architectures equally.”

Amazon’s announcement increases server choice, meaning faster and cheaper servers, as well as opening the door to new innovations based on Arm architecture. With RHEL 8 Arm-prepared, access is simple for “anyone who’s used to a workflow in EC2,” Masters said. “You can test drive it; if it works well, you can adopt it. There’s no obligation.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE