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I had this idea about ARM servers that they were going to be significantly smaller, demand less power, and generate less heat than the existing x86 units. Wher

I had this idea about ARM servers that they were going to be significantly smaller, demand less power, and generate less heat than the existing x86 units. Where I work all of our servers fit in something like 22U and I expect a solid minority of them could be swapped out for something smaller. Instead what we got are big chips with ARM ISA that are essentially scaled up to roughly Xeon sizes... which in hindsight I suppose is obvious coz that's probably where the money is. Nevertheless I still think there is a niche for smaller servers with smaller granulation of quanta of compute capacity.

tjoff 8y ago
Not sure how small you want it but there are smaller and less power hungry x86 alternatives too. The more server-oriented atom chips (2-16 cores) are pretty decent and the much more expensive but more powerful Xeon-D (4-16 cores) can both be found in mini-ITX motherboards and pretty low-power configurations. Have not kept myself up to date in case AMD offers decent alternatives in this segment. Though my hope would be for ARM to lower the price point for these kind of servers.