It’s been an incredibly busy season of event coverage for theCUBE, and right now feels like the lull before a storm, as there are significant events quickly approaching, including AWS re:Invent 2023 in November.

That event will see plenty of in-depth coverage from theCUBE. There will be something “pretty good” in store, predicted theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier (pictured, left).

“You can connect the dots here for AWS — you’re going to see some high-performance compute and GPU support; you’re going to see the data story become clearer,” Furrier said on the latest episode of theCUBE Podcast. “The wildcard is going to be what the ecosystem does. Can the ecosystem go to the next level? I’ve been very critical of Amazon’s ecosystem being monetized at these events, as you know. So, we’ll see.”

Still, it’s too early in the game to suggest that AWS is going to blow its lead to make the playoffs, according to Furrier. That metaphor led to a discussion between Furrier and his co-analyst Dave Vellante (right) about the return of the National Football League and streaming platforms.

“[Thursday night’s game] was not an [Amazon] Prime game. It was an NBC kickoff, but I interviewed this week the CISO from Prime Video, and that was amazing,” Furrier said. “That’s going to be part of our AWS Startup Showcase that’s going to be airing [on Sept. 14].”

When it comes to the streaming platforms, whoever can figure out integrations — such as MGM+ with Amazon Prime — best with billing is going to win, according to Furrier. When it comes to those user experiences, whoever integrates and eliminates context switching is going to be able to charge a premium, Vellante added.

“That’s going to be really important. I’ve got a Roku, but that’s a dead-end, right? Because all these internet TVs now do everything that Roku does,” he said.

Thoughts on the Arm IPO

This week, theCUBE analysts also discussed new details shared about Arm Holdings PLC’s stock market plans. The U.K.-based chip designer is hoping to raise as much as $4.87 billion in its upcoming public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. What caught the attention of Vellante was something shared by Rob Hof, editor-in-chief of SiliconANGLE, in his “This week in enterprise” column: a quote from Albie Amankona, an analyst at global research firm Third Bridge.

“It’s a lot more challenging for Arm to capitalize on the current trend for AI than a company like Nvidia, because around 60% to 70% of Arm’s revenues are derived from mobile and the AI landscape is centered around cloud-based operations, rather than being heavily integrated at the device or edge level, where Arm is more prominent,” Amankona wrote in an email.

Both Furrier and Vellante strongly disagreed with that view. First of all, one of the first uses of artificial intelligence is the consumer with face recognition, according to Vellante.

“Most of the innovations in the enterprise come from consumers if not all of them,” he said. “I think whereas much of the AI, if not most of the AI today, is this guy saying, ‘Modeling in the cloud,’ the vast majority is going to be AI inferencing at the edge. I think Arm architectures are going to dominate that. The fundamental starting premise is not right.”

The other thing suggested by Amankona was that Arm itself says that generative AI poses potential risks to certain parts of its business, since AI models generally run on graphic cards, not the central processing units that Arm makes. But Arm makes CPUs, GPUs, NPUs and accelerators, according to Vellante.

The final point that Vellante took contention with was that the other big risk to Arm was RISC-V already making inroads. However, Arm has a huge lead over other alternative architectures.

“Alibaba is leaning into RISC-V. I think [Amankona’s] fundamental assumptions [are] wrong,” Vellante said. “Now, having said all that, he’s correct in that Arm is not growing that rapidly.”

However, that may be more associated with its business model. Arm has a model where it is licensing its technologies — but it’s got a “killer, awesome platform,” Vellante added.

“It’s volume, volume, volume,” he said. “Arm is going to win in terms of low cost; it’s going to win in terms of performance, low energy. And it’s going to, I think, dominate.”

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Matt Garman, SVP of sales and marketing at Amazon Web Services
David Brown, VP of compute and networking services at AWS
Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of database, analytics and ML at AWS
Adam Selipsky, CEO at AWS
Brian Lozada, CISO of Amazon Prime
Charlie Kaufman, American filmmaker and novelist
Deion Sanders, American football coach
Marion Campbell, former football coach
Teresa Carlson, president and CCO of Flexport
Dave Clark, former CEO of Flexport
Ryan Peterson, founder and CEO of Flexport
Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO of Snowflake
Fred Luddy, chairman of the board at ServiceNow
Benoit Dageville, president of product and co-founder of Snowflake
Terry Hardie, principal software engineer at Snowflake
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft
Larry Ellison, chairman of the board and CTO of Oracle
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms
Eric Schmidt, former CEO and chairman of Google
Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO and chairman of Apple
Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta
Chris Cox, CPO of Meta
Larry Page, co-founder of Google
Sergei Brin, co-founder of Google
Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard
Dave Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packart
Robert Hof, editor-in-chief at SiliconANGLE Media
Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face
John Chambers, CEO of JC2 Ventures
Marc Andreessen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Reid Hoffman, partner at Greylock Partners
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia
Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
Robin Li, CEO of Baidu
Paul Martino, founder of Bullpen Capital

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Photo: SiliconANGLE