Still, the missing ingredient
ARM servers in the datacenter are not going to be a Thing until there is a sufficiently common systems architecture that important software can be portable between different vendors' implementations without a massive conversion and optimization effort. Compare for example AWS ARM instances and the Fujitsu ARM compute nodes. The market today is a lot like the desktop computer world before the IBM PC (which, incidentally, is the direct ancestor of the Lintel server of today). Contrast the rapid adoption of GPUs for compute, which is facilitated enormously by Nvidia driving a standardized API across a broad range of cards.
The worst case scenario for ARM servers is that the market remains an archipelago of incompatible implementations. The second worst is that AWS ARM instances become the de facto standard by sheer weight of market presence, and everybody else is left trying to "do what AWS does" by inspection, much like S3.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
