Honestly, I've been down this road a number of times before. With ARM specifically and the Calxeda experiment. Here is what I wrote in 2013 [1] "2013 was not

Honestly, I've been down this road a number of times before. With ARM specifically and the Calxeda experiment. Here is what I wrote in 2013 [1] "2013 was not the year of ARM. It was the year of ARM hype. But for reasons having nothing to do with ARM itself. Basically ARM was the anti-Intel. Everyone was looking for an anti-Intel, in order to maintain pressure on Intel. I can’t tell you how many times I’d heard “Intel is done” or “Intel is in trouble” in meetings with customers, or partners. This wasn’t true, though there was a great deal of wishing it were true on the part of some. We hedged a bit by trying to work with Calxeda. Unfortunately, as we rapidly discovered, the claims about ARM as a viable replacement for Intel were simply not true (specifically talking about Calxeda’s chips) at this time. Calxeda were positioned in customers and partners minds as being “just like Intel’s maybe a little slower and much less power”. Neither of these statements were true. The chips were badly underpowered, and when you aggregated enough of them to do interesting work, they ran … HOT … ." What we found was a strong misperception in end users minds, what I will say ... willfully ... placed there by interested parties, that 1 ARM core == 1 Intel core. This is most definitely untrue (then, and as far as I can tell, now). I know that people really want a viable alternative to Intel, and I understand why. But, honestly, ARM isn't it, and doesn't look like it will ever be it. There are many reasons for this, but it boils down to actual real world application performance, and toolchain issues. The former is the main reason why I am betting against ARM now. The latter is made even more difficult by a fractured ARM market. Which ARM ABI should you write for, and do you have good optimizing compilers for? So I am very skeptical at this moment. I've seen the song and dance before. Then I did the testing. And it was embarrassingly bad. 200 ARM cores [2] were not as fast as 16 Intel cores. All while the 200 ARM cores consumed the same if not greater power, had a smaller memory address space, and were slower. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this. Though I wouldn't bet on this outcome. [1] https://scalability.org/2013/12/the-evolving-market-for-hpc-part-1-recent-past/comment-page-1/ https://scalability.org/2013/12/the-evolving-market-for-hpc-... [2] https://scalability.org/2013/02/a-lightly-armed-jackrabbit-60-bay-unit/ https://scalability.org/2013/02/a-lightly-armed-jackrabbit-6...