[sounds]

I don't want to predict the future, but if HP thinks it can win over customers with 100% marketing and no technical details, that's not a good sign.

I make the IT purchasing decisions for my company, and I know what an ARM CPU is, and why it's a good idea. Therefore, I know that HP's approach doesn't make sense: ARM hasn't been proven in this market. Therefore, customers and vendors (like HP) need to work very closely and there needs to be openness about design issues, performance tuning, etc.

HP's starting off on the wrong foot. Maybe there's enough money in ARM that they'll figure it out. But if I have to make a prediction, I'm of the opinion the ARM server market is going to take off so fast that HP will be left behind.

[wmf]

...win over customers with 100% marketing and no technical details...

Hasn't the enterprise market worked that way for years?

[yuhong]

The fundamental flaw here I think is centralized purchasing.

[skrebbel]

No clue why that got voted down. I think you're right.

[Andys]

This. is why Itanium server revenue has exceeded entire AMD server revenue in recent years.

[rbanffy]

Ask them if they can lend you one that looks promising. Then run your workload on it and do some benchmarks. You should never rely on vendor-supplied data to make your decisions

[seltzered_]

Think of this as Calxeda/HP's minimum viable product in the ARM server market. Someone's gotta put something out there to get feedback.

I wouldn't be surprised if they give some servers away to big enough companies in exchange for feedback on how to make deployment software going forward.