That 15% gap matters a lot for the kinds of companies that Broadcom is targeting (and many others that they are not), and they are okay with spending millions t

That 15% gap matters a lot for the kinds of companies that Broadcom is targeting (and many others that they are not), and they are okay with spending millions to get it. Also, you get support with those millions. That's a requirement for these kinds of companies as well. That said, I agree that there are many shops that will migrate to something like Ryzen, throw KVM on that and call it a day (or do what I did and use Graviton spot instances for anything stateful and small Graviton Lambdas for the rest). Those suckers are fast. And that's before we touch software-defined networking a la NSX and virtualized storage a la vSAN. NSX, ESX and vSAN work together to provide near-line-rate networking and networked storage performance with a really nicely packaged frontend. Yes, you can use paravirt-io and ceph and get nearly there, but it's "nearly" and setting this up has a significantly higher skill bar for sysadmins. That alone is a dealbreaker for small shops that aren't tech forward.