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You can't actually buy TX2. I don't know about market availability of Amberwing either (if you know please let me know). There is an abundance of arm stuff in
by kev009 9y ago
You can't actually buy TX2. I don't know about market availability of Amberwing either (if you know please let me know). There is an abundance of arm stuff in the embedded space where it is king, and it's true you can pick them up for next to nothing but somewhat orthogonal to servers (flattened device trees vs ACPI/UEFI etc)
You can web buy an S821LC straight from IBM for $5k for the past couple years. The AC922 is GA. Supermicro will sell you a P8 right now and P9 in May for nominal prices and the CPUs are cheaper than Skylake by a very wide margin.
Not directly related to your comment but I get the feeling a lot of people complaining about price are navel gazing and have no idea how much a production server costs and how the costs break down. Right now storage is generally 50+% of the cost. DRAM is a very high fixed cost at the moment as well. Intel flatted the quad socket SKUs into the "Scalable Series" so Skylake represents a big price increase for a lot of builders. To help re-calibrate people, IBM doesn't have $6-12k CPUs in the dual socket config but Intel does at bins people would want for common workloads.
- jacques_chester 9y ago> Not directly related to your comment but I get the feeling a lot of people complaining about price are navel gazing and have no idea how much a production server costs and how the costs break down. They're not asking for production servers. $5k for a workstation, for a minority architecture, is basically a fancy way of saying "no" to the army of tinkerers you need to widen the base.
- voxadam 9y agoWhy can't you buy a TX2? Arrow appears to have 462 in stock right now.
- kev009 9y agoI have my own Cavium rep. Show me a real CPU, board and worthwhile sheet metal (i.e 10+ nvme) I can buy in volume because you might know something he doesn't and I'd be happy to eval it.
- kev009 9y agosee i.e. https://www.servethehome.com/gigabyte-thunderxstation-using-cavium-thunderx2-launched/ https://www.servethehome.com/gigabyte-thunderxstation-using-... for public info "At STH we are working with Gigabyte and Cavium and will share more about the ThunderX2 architecture as we are given the go-ahead. We have heard the next production run is in the Q2 2018 timeframe." This has been my experience with cavium, bait and switch slideware and when you do finally get a sample it has so far been undesirable (octeon, TX1)