When, at the beginning of 2015, Amazon bought Israeli chip design company Annapurna Labs for some 350 million dollars, nobody really understood why. Now, one year later, Annapurna Labs announced the Alpine platform-on-chip and subsystems product line based on 32-bit ARMv7 and 64-bit ARMv8 architectures and targeted at next-generation digital services for home gateways, Wi-Fi routers, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices.

Apparently Amazon is not satisfied by the rate at which we replace the gateways and routers in our homes, severly limiting the amount and quality of services that could be provided by them. Their solution is to (help) develop better hardware that will, hopefully, last longer. For now, the Alpine platform provides up to four cores, advanced storage interfaces, PCIe Gen3, multimode Ethernet connectivity of up to 10G, DDR4 and 2MB of L2 cache. The platform works with a variety of standard open source libraries and development models including Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), OpenWRT, and open source hypervisor and container frameworks.

Several Alpine-based products are already available, and the technology is now also available to OEMs and service providers.

Processing power to the people, brought to you by Amazon with a smile.