[floatboth]

> noone has put together a real ARM alternative for the server side

Cavium (now under Marvell) and Ampere both did. Huawei/HiSilicon are also apparently coming.

(Also Qualcomm, but they quit for mysterious reasons. "Want to focus on mobile" or something.)

But these are all very high end solutions. For the low end, there's Marvell's Armada8k (MACCHIATObin)… and kind of an empty void in the middle :(

[marmaduke]

Cavium’s is a 96 core x 4 node in a 2U config. Sure it’s high end, but it’s what you need to compete with similar compute dense rack servers from eg Dell.

[floatboth]

The original ThunderX was up to 96 cores in 2 sockets, but single core perfomance was unimpressive (comparable to Cortex-A72).

ThunderX2 is 64 cores in 2 sockets, with 4-way SMT, up to 3GHz turbo, and the cores are way better.

// It's great that they're competing with dense rack servers, I just wish the low end to mid range market wasn't ignored :(

[marmaduke]

Yep I guess it’s a ramp up issue. Easier to have bare metal hard ware at high end and then slice it up into cheap servers.