what server hardware does the amazon cloud use?

Question

Does anyone know the hardware vendor amazon uses for their EC2 cloud?

Answer 1

Amazon statement

Regarding CPU

Amazon EC2 is built on commodity hardware, over time there may be several different types of physical hardware underlying EC2 instances. Our goal is to provide a consistent amount of CPU capacity no matter what the actual underlying hardware

A blog showing some research made on the hardware is here http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/amazons-physical-hardware-and-ec2-compute-unit/

Points from the blog

High-memory instances

• Dual-socket Intel Xeon X5550 (Nahelem) 2.66GHz processors.
• Intel Xeon X5550 processor has 4 cores, and each core is capable of hyper-threading

High-CPU instances

• dual-socket Intel Xeon E5410 2.33GHz
• E5410 only has 4 cores

Standard instances

• Single socket Intel Xeon E5430 4 core 2.66GHz processor
  or
• Single socket AMD Dual-Core Opteron 2218 HE Processor

Answer 2

I don't know the answer (if indeed there is a single answer) but effectively, it doesn't matter one bit. The only thing that customers get is virtualized. Amazon could replace everything overnight without even impacting customers.

Maybe they do what Google does and buys whiteboxes without cases in pods, and replaces the whole pod when it goes bad.