The biggest advantages they have are Supermicro, existing partherships with server sales channels and manufacturers, and most notably, memory controllers. Mode

The biggest advantages they have are Supermicro, existing partherships with server sales channels and manufacturers, and most notably, memory controllers. Modern ARM really is very near to competitive with x86, but only so long as you don't touch ram. The entire memory hierarchy of A15 or A9 is really weak compared to what is found in any x86 cpu. The most egregious example is that while A15 is much faster than Atom when doing any kind of mostly-register/L1 benchmark, it tends to lose to Atom on real benchmarks with a lot of data. Low-latency high-speed memory controllers are really hard, and there really are only 3 companies in the world that have proven that they can build them properly (IBM, AMD, Intel). Server workloads tend to be very memory-bound, so if AMD is the only ARM server vendor with a really good memory subsystem, they can potentially do very well.