If you look a couple years out, if there's an a2, etc. there are a few things that could notch up performance. There's the 7nm process (unless Amazon's a super

If you look a couple years out, if there's an a2, etc. there are a few things that could notch up performance. There's the 7nm process (unless Amazon's a super early user of it like Apple--seems unlikely), there's newer ARM IP, and they could have accelerators off to the side for compression and public key crypto, as the Seattle chips were planned to do. I don't think the goal of ARM server chips should be core-for-core near-parity with Intel big cores anytime soon, because those have much bigger die area and power needs, so you potentially pay in number of chips per wafer, yields, density, and power use. Instead you keep something reasonably small, try to get single-thread perf good _enough_ for a chunk of apps, and try to provide much better cost per unit throughput. (They could also go for efficiency improvements to further cut power-related costs or make up for more consumption by faster cores. These seem far-out but theoretically: mobile-like big/little arrangements so light loads use even less power, or boxes with low-power RAM, or (least far-out) more of their Nitro IP moved onto the SoC. Who knows, just saying it's a wide-open design space.) If this takes off enough for Intel to really pay close attention (not a certainty!), they do have their own cool scale-out experiments in Xeon D (an SoC Facebook originally wanted with relatively few cores and low clocks, with some SKUs including compression/crypto acceleration) and their Atom server chips. Getting something good and Intel responding with something better isn't the worst possible result.