From what I&#x27;ve seen of Cavium, I wouldn&#x27;t describe them as general-purpose CPUs, though they are nice for their own niche. I don&#x27;t think anyone in the west has gotten hands on anything except press releases of ShenWei systems, so it is unproven as far as I can tell. If it is so great why was the Chinese National Supercomputer Center trying to get their hands on Xeons so badly to upgrade Tianhe? :P<p>Edit: Along the lines of Cavium, you might want to check out Tilera. They aren&#x27;t exactly general-purpose either but they are more so than Octeons, and have respectable single-thread performance from what I&#x27;ve seen.