Inversely, I think it's siloed things in somewhat unhealthy ways. We now have a number of vendors that sell/rent you machines that are not generally purchasable. I don't think we've seen too many negative consequences yet, but if things continue in this direction then choosing a cloud provider for a high performance application (eg, something you'll want to compile to machine code and is therefore architecture specific in some way as opposed to a python flask app or something), one may have to make decisions that lock one into a particular cloud vendor. Or at least, it will further increase the cost of changing vendors if you have to significantly tweak your application for some oddities between diff arm implementations at different hosting providers, etc.

I would much rather see some kind of mandatory open market sale of all cpu lines so that in theory you can run graviton procs in rackspace, apple m5 servers in azure, etc.

> over half of all new compute capacity added to AWS over the past three years has been Graviton-based. That's an amazing stat.

Yes and maybe no. They do "cheat" in that internal / managed services often use Graviton where possible. It works out cheaper without the Intel / AMD "tax".