Amazon is pushing deeper into the smart home market by selling branded semiconductors to home equipment designers who are working on Internet-of-Things devices, WiFi routers and other smart home appliances.
The chips come from Annapurna Labs, which Amazon purchased last year for a rumored $350 million. The company announced today that its Alpine chipset is now available for a wide range of applications.
However, don’t expect “Amazon Inside” stickers to start showing up on your computers in the same way Intel has marketed its devices. Annapurna’s chips are more suited for networking and storage tasks, which may not benefit from Amazon’s name on the package as much. Manufacturers are the target audience instead, as they’ll be able to turn to Amazon for the parts they need to build their smart devices.
Annapurna’s chips are based on ARM technology, which is the same chip technology that powers most smartphones around the world today. However, Intel has been working on breaking into the smart home market for years with its non-ARM chips, putting Amazon on the long list of Intel competitors.
Devices from Synology, Netgear and other manufacturers already use Annapurna’s chips to handle some encryption, media processing and other multicore processing tasks that need to run on devices with limited power or space.
