If you thought Amazon’s own-branded products were a little strange – baby wipes, anyone? – then things just got a little more serious. The retailer announced this week that it’s starting to sell its own ARM-based silicon chips.
Amazon purchased the semiconductor firm Annapurna Labs last year, and now its readied a line of chips under the name Alpine for sale. But it probably won’t be dispatched via Prime, because they’re really intended for use by OEMs.
The chips aren’t particularly high-octane hardware, but instead the kind of integrated brains that can be used by Wi-Fi routers, Network Attached Storage devices and media streaming devices. For those tasks, though, they sound more than up to the task, with up to four processors and a bunch of connectivity options.
In fact, they’re already being adopted by the likes of Asus and Netgear for some of their products. It’s unclear whether Amazon will start using the chips in its own devices or not.
[Annapurna Labs via Bloomberg]
Image by Andrew Cavell under Creative Commons licence