Re: Fundamental limits
”There is room for differentiation. There are workloads that benefit from different types of computing, (e.g. search and FPGA's), that the cloud providers could offer.”
Not really. Someone somewhere else will be offering the same blend of chips (FPGA, GPU, CPU). If a cloud provider is buying the 'best' chips in the open market then the others can also buy the very same ones.
The only way to truly differentiate is to make their own chips and be better at that than anyone else. It's the only way to get exclusivity. But getting into the chip design business is a huge challenge and fraught with pitfalls. Being 'compatible' means a struggle to be better than the original. Being incompatible means no one will have any software or firmware to run on your cloud and any efficiencies you managed to achieve don't count for anything.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
