Is Arm ready for server dominance?
My concern about this is that with the failure of Qualcomm Centriq, there is no industry standard&#x2F;affordable&#x2F;easy to buy ARM based server platform ordinary persons and small&#x2F;medium sized businesses can acquire.<p>It&#x27;s great that Amazon has ARM based stuff, but it&#x27;s something proprietary they&#x27;re purchasing in large quantities from a manufacturer they have a very close relationship with. Undoubtedly the physical hypervisor platform and motherboard these things are running on is something totally bespoke and designed to Amazon&#x27;s unique requirements.<p>I can&#x27;t pull out my visa card and go buy a (atx, microatx, mini-itx) format motherboard for an ARM CPU, the CPU itself, RAM, etc, and build a system to run debian, centos, RHEL, ubuntu whatever on.<p>This means that, sure, you can get an EC2 ARM based server, but it&#x27;s something you can&#x27;t physically own and you&#x27;ll be paying cloud based service rates forever if you want to keep running it. There are some categories of business and government entities where not having things on-premises, or fully owning and controlling the hypervisor all the way down to the bare metal, is a non starter.<p>If the ARM platform Amazon is buying becomes truly price&#x2F;performance competitive with a single&#x2F;dual socket xeon or threadripper&#x2F;epyc, it also gives a possible competitive advantage to Amazon over any medium-sized cloud based VM provider out there currently selling (xen, kvm) based VMs on x86-64 hypervisors.<p>Based on what&#x27;s available on the market right now I see no signs of there being a viable hardware-purchasing alternative to Intel or AMD based motherboards and CPUs.