new microserver chip coming out

[the_tyrant]

I wanted to post this a long time ago, but I really can't make up my mind on what to say. I really want to hear what you have to say about it.


Personally, I believe that ARM in servers is too much hype, not enough actual potential. My reasons are as following.


First of all, lets consider what ARM chips have an advantage in. ARM CPUs have really low power consumption, but with the low power consumption, their performance isn't really good. The best ARM chips out there right now, are barely capable of defeating the lowest rung x86 processors.

Now with servers, the main thing that should be considered should be performance per watt, not just raw performance or power consumption. There are little actual numbers (since cross platform benchmarks are practically non-existent), but I believe that x86 or Power processers are better in performance/watt. ARM is capable of delivering an extremely low power consumption (although x86 is just as good if not better with Intel's new Atom platform), but their performance is generally poor compared to their x86 counterparts.

Also, the whole "smaller servers" thing is disappearing. With the excellent VMware and HyperV virtualization platforms. The whole small server sector is probably not going to take off. After all, Atom servers aren't really popular are they? If they aren't really popular, why should be believe that ARM will make the sector take off? Why would a small dedicated server be used where a virtual machine can be used instead?

Finally, the software support simply isn't there. Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (arguably the 2 most popular choices) don't support ARM. Many other pieces of commonly used server software like Microsoft SQL Server don't support the ARM platform either.


I believe the window on when ARM can gain success in the server market is closing fast. Virtualization, cloud instances, and low power consumption x86 will eat ARM's lunch in the server space.