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Long term there is a huge market for server-oriented CPUs that can compete with Intel Xeon, which currently has a near monopoly in the server market. Note that
by eklitzke 4y ago
Long term there is a huge market for server-oriented CPUs that can compete with Intel Xeon, which currently has a near monopoly in the server market. Note that a lot of companies are already working on this: Ampere (ARM), Amazon (Graviton3, etc.), and likely Nvidia, Rivos (RISC-V), etc.
The best of market ARM designs don't really compete head-to-head with Xeon right now, but there are still a ton of server applications where they make already make sense. As a simple example companies like Google and Facebook have hundreds of thousands of servers that are doing things like running memcached or running some application like D/GFS where the server is mostly just doing a lot of I/O and doesn't necessarily need really beefy single-threaded CPU performance.
Longer term obviously if there are ARM or RISC-V CPUs that can compete head-to-head with Xeon in terms of features and single threaded performance then that opens up pretty much the entire enterprise/server market.
- MBCook 4y agoPerformance is irrelevant depending on metrics. If my new zCPU chip is 60% as fast as a Xeon at your task, that’s a problem. If it can do it at 40% of the Xeon’s power, things get interesting. I could use twice as many zCPUs, be 20% faster, and use 20% less power. That also means less cooling capacity in my DC. Some tasks will always need the absolute best single threaded performance. But a lot don’t. And the Xeon’s power requirements leave a large opening we’re starting to see other companies poke at with things like Graviton.