Last week Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba announced its Q3 earnings. Cloud revenue was $553 million, an impressive 104 percent year-over-year increase. That comes out to a run rate in the range of $2.2 billion, well behind Google which announced it is pulling in a billion dollars a quarter and still buried behind the market leaders all of whom reported around $4 billion+ a quarter.
While the growth was impressive, keep in mind when you have a small market share, it’s much easier to grow a big number than when you have a larger market share. In other words, it gets harder to grow, the larger you get.
It is worth noting, however that the growth spurt allowed Alibaba to show up in the top five of Synergy Research’s most recent Cloud Infrastructure Market Share report for the first time. While the market share was only around 3 or 4 percent. it’s still significant because no longer being lumped together with “next 10” or “rest of market.”
Synergy reports that the cloud market grew 46 percent in the fourth quarter, and each of the biggest cloud companies benefited over the smaller ones. “In large part the expansion was driven by aggressive growth of Amazon (AWS), Microsoft, Google and Alibaba, who all increased their share of the worldwide market at the expense of smaller cloud providers,” Synergy wrote in their report.
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Alibaba Crafts A 16-Core RISC-V Chip @ 2.5GHz
Alibaba this week announced a RISC-V 64-bit processor comprised of 16 cores at 2.5GHz. The Chinese RISC-V CPU is fabbed at 12nm and this RISC-V processor supports out of order execution. This Alibaba design achieves a 7.1 Coremark/MHz rating, a great deal faster than any other publicly announced RISC-V processor. It's still not as fast as say the newest AMD Ryzen 9 or Intel Core i7/i9 parts, but it's certainly much better than all of the other RISC-V processors/SoCs we've seen announced to date. Unfortunately additional details on this Alibaba design are light.
Also at Tom's Hardware.
Related: Alibaba Cloud Climbs to Top 5
Linux Foundation and RISC-V Proponents Launch CHIPS Alliance
Qualcomm Invests in RISC-V Startup SiFive
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 22 2018, @04:17AM (1 child)
A great deal of teeth gnashing accompanied my work to configure my own mail server. It worked well for a few months then the smtp server stopped working
After a great deal of carefyc consideration I decided I just didn't want to deal with it so now I pay Google five dollars per mailbox per month
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 22 2018, @10:40AM
Runbox. $20 / year. Dedicated to privacy
(Score: 2) by cocaine overdose on Thursday March 22 2018, @05:48AM (1 child)
I want my ten fucking dollars back, Alibozo. I had 0.03 cents billed for an unlimited plan I already paid 1 year in advance, so you took out $10 from my PayMafioso. $10 that was part of monetary compensation for services rendered to a kind old lady. You stole $10 from an old granny, Alibaby. I don't even care that you cancelled my servers, the ones I paid in advance for, when I pulled my payment options. I just want that $10 back.
In-patiently,
Cocaine Overdose
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 22 2018, @06:40AM
I suggest you to demand a proof of money from Jerry Maguire instead, I believe he'd be able to show you more than $10.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 22 2018, @07:57AM (3 children)
Pricing [alibabacloud.com]
Note how the prices grow from World->Hong Kong->Mainland China. One would think the closer to home, the lower the prices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 22 2018, @08:03AM (1 child)
The price of real time censorship and firewalls?
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday March 22 2018, @09:03AM
Quantified in USD, yes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday March 22 2018, @04:05PM
Probably pricing increases toward target audience. Also, power is a major factor, and while China is not expensive for electricity, there are cheaper places on the planet.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday March 22 2018, @02:53PM
I didn't know IBM had a public cloud.