The big deal is on the http://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium-thunderx-48-arm-cores/19 http://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-caviu

The big deal is on the http://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium-thunderx-48-arm-cores/19 http://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium-thu... page: the MySQL transactions per watt is absymal compared to the Xeon D. Really, badly absymal. So... this is not a useful server. When someone says ARM I am thinking "low power" but this is a 120W CPU which is beaten by the 65W Xeon D-1581. Pass. Let me emphasize: very often I do not care about absolute performance numbers because your power budget is almost always limited in a data centre, what I care about is performance per watt. Which here the Xeon D wins. Like, big time. Tangentially: this is where Ryzen battle will be as well. I was crunching the numbers from http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph11170/85875.png http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph11170/85875.png and the Ryzen 1700 is only beaten in performance per watt by the i7 7700T and only by 5% while in performance for dollar the 1700 has a comfy advantage over every Intel CPU, 62% over the i7 7700T which is a lot to pay for a 5% advantage. This shows the Ryzen is practically on par with the i7 series: the 7700T is 4 cores in 35W, the 1700 is 8 cores in 65W and they are head-to-head. I want to see the 8 and 16 core Xeon D chips battle Naples but I am afraid AMD is simply not yet in the low wattage game. But I really would love to see some competition there!