[xt00]

Really what somebody needs to do is say "I built a custom chipset that has 32 octa-core Allwinner A80's on it". It has a A15/A7 big little architecture. I would guess the processors cost like $25 each. So the board would be like $800 + maybe $200 more in other components like RAM and flash. So $1000 and you get a cluster that has 256 cores and 32 parallel memory buses and 32 parallel flash chips--seems like that $1000 would get you a pretty epic server. Plus each of those chips have powerVR GPU's, so you would have some GPU capability that Xeon servers don't have. Buying $35 raspberry pi's is basically $5 useful stuff in there and $30 not useful overhead. So better to actually build a legit server board covered in ARM processors and then actually compare how well that $1000 is spent compared to a dual 6 core xeon blade.

[insanebits]

There are a GPU's with hundreds of cores if that's what you're after. And there already are ARM server boards, for example quick google turned up: http://www.cavium.com/newsevents-GIGABYTE-announces-384-Core...

[Matthias247]

I think Intel built comparable setups themselves with the Xeon Phi line, which composes a lot of Atom cores. I think that these got not more mainstream shows that such setups are mainly helpful for some very specific use cases and that the traditional Xeons with a lower number of high performance cores are better suited for mainstream server tasks.

[xt00]

And, at the end of the day, that "epic server" I am talking about would likely have some big limitations of working with big amounts of data. It seems like it would be more suited to a kind of "grab some small amount of data and do a little bit with it then leave it alone" type task.