[jws]

Assuming the ARM servers can beat Intel in "work per joule", which I think they will, then they can win in what is now the VPS space.

I use virtual private servers from three different vendors for a number of projects, and they make a lot of sense from the cost standpoint, but they have a huge drawback that you are sharing resources with others and their workloads impact your abilities (plus any one of them could be a vector to introduce a hypervisor exploit and compromise the system). I'd much rather have a small computer to myself.

Imagine a 1U system[1] with 32 independent 1GHz ARM servers[2]. That hits about the same power use as a modern intel machine, has an amazing memory bandwidth by comparison, and if you rent them out for ~$8/month each (smallest slices available now) it is a money farm.

Systems like this will also work for problems that scale laterally. Pushing that a bit, imagine if a CDN vendor started putting racks of these at their strategic locations, you could improve your application's response time by hosting nearby, handling locally what you can, and bundling the heavy lifting back to your big servers in an efficient way.

[1] Or 2U if space isn't at a premium. They are easier to cool. [2] Disks go elsewhere, say across a 1gbps ethernet switch to a SAN. Build in the switches and you don't need the magnetics for the ethernet, there are clever capacitive solutions.

[patrickgzill]

Actually the issue is maximum amount of RAM, not CPU power. 2x 12-core Opterons gives you 24 2Ghz cores out of the box, with up to 128 or 256GB of RAM.

[lsc]

ayup. I've looked into renting out small ARM servers rather than VPSs, and the biggest thing stopping me is that the ram is not socketed, and all the boards I can get are made for client boxes (e.g. not enough ram, and too much video hardware driving up the cost.) I mean, in the hosting industry, we expect to pay off our hardware in something like four months, and unless you are a lot better at marketing than I am, it's difficult to charge a whole lot more than $20 per gigabyte of ram per month, so the total cost for the unit (including cpu and disk) has to be around $80 for every gigabyte of ram or so. right now, the panda board looks like the best choice, and even before disk you are looking at almost $200 for something with a power supply, etc..

Also, nobody makes a reasonable power backplane (so I can power 10 or what have you of these little pandaboards off one power supply.)

If these things took DIMMs or the like, the ram problem would be solved. (Really, I'd want ecc, which isn't usually available in SODIMMs, but I bet there are enough people who don't care to sell such a service even without ECC.)

But for now, virtualizing larger servers is a better idea. If you are that concerned about others stepping on you, it's possible to dedicate a disk to a particular virtual server alone; that would solve the biggest resource contention problems that come with virtualization.

[wmf]

That has nothing to do with the core, so there's no reason why an ARM server couldn't support the same capacity.