Re: What will it take to loosen the x86 giant's edge stranglehold?
Nonsense, there are plenty of general purpose ARM based processors out there...the vast majority of servers out there aren't doing anything particuarly niche...they just hosting websites and databases etc...ARM CPU's can do this easily without any specialist configuration / tooling etc...
Most common server technologies that are designed to run on Linux have an ARM build available and they have been available for a very long time.
The Ampere Altra at full tilt uses 50W less than a competing Epyc CPU. Given that most servers don't often operate at full tilt, I'd imagine the Ampere is even more efficient than that! Doesn't sound like much, but over the scale of a rack, it adds up...50W is about £6-7 a week at least, I think, hard to say given the energy price changes of late...might be a lot more!
Over 10 servers, that's £70 a week saved, or £280 a month, £3,360 a year. Now scale that across an entire datacentre and you've got whacking great big potential savings. Even higher if you run ARM CPUs in a low power state (which is probably more than enough for most use cases). In that situation, I'd expect to save 100W per CPU. So your saving doubles...potentially even more. None of this takes into account the savings you'd make on cooling as well...your aircon won't have to work anywhere near as hard which will save even more energy.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/322988-ampere-will-launch-128-core-arm-cpus-by-the-end-of-2021
For applications like NGINX proxies, web servers and the like, it's very hard to argue against ARM...trouble is, if you win the argument...you can't buy one because at the moment, most ARM servers seem to be geared up towards tackling the top end of the market and cost at least £8000 (which you're essentially getting for £5k with the power savings) for a spec that makes sense...there's nothing down near the bottom...if you want a 64-core or bigger beast, you're sorted...if you just want a simple, really efficient, 1U, 8-16 core box with 16GB RAM, there's nothing.
What we need is a 16 core ARM equivalent of the Dell PowerEdge R240 in the £300-£500 range (excluding storage)...they would fly off the shelves in my opinion. I would snap a load up in a heartbeat and cluster them.