That's like complaining that all books are made by Penguin Press or something, ignoring the effort individual authors make.
Most of the value of chips is in their design, which is owned by different entities. Manufacturing is important too (only TSMC can make these advanced designs at scale and at lower costs than the competition).
The question I have is if Cobalt has any innovations in its design, or if its just bog-standard ARM Neoverse cores. Its not too big of a deal to download ARM's latest designs and slap them into... erm... your designs. But hopefully Microsoft added value somewhere along the road (The Uncore remains important: cache sizes, communications, and the like).
It's not a matter of giving due credit, but supply constraints. Books aren't limited by the availability of printing presses, are they? (maybe they are and I just didn't know?)
But if TSMC is the only company that can do this, they're a bottleneck for the entire world. Not to mention a strategic and geopolitical risk for the West.
It's be nice if some domestic companies invested in fabs again...
Microsoft claims that Cobalt has a much lower power consumption than any other Arm CPUs that they have used.
Presumably this means that Cobalt has a much lower power consumption than the current Ampere CPUs used by Azure.
Most of the power consumption reduction for a given performance may have come from using a more recent TSMC process, together with a more recent Arm Neoverse core, but perhaps there might be also some other innovation in the MS design.
Most of the value of chips is in their design, which is owned by different entities. Manufacturing is important too (only TSMC can make these advanced designs at scale and at lower costs than the competition).
The question I have is if Cobalt has any innovations in its design, or if its just bog-standard ARM Neoverse cores. Its not too big of a deal to download ARM's latest designs and slap them into... erm... your designs. But hopefully Microsoft added value somewhere along the road (The Uncore remains important: cache sizes, communications, and the like).