I haven't looked at ARMv8 in depth but I doubt it's a "from the ground up" architecture, let alone one specifically for servers. I'm pretty sure that ARMv8 is a

I haven't looked at ARMv8 in depth but I doubt it's a "from the ground up" architecture, let alone one specifically for servers. I'm pretty sure that ARMv8 is a microarchitecture anyway, which means it's probably stuck with a ton of the same (or incrementally improved) IP cores except for the critical peripherals (memory manager, cache, etc). The flexibility that ARM has because of the speed of their microarchitecture iteration process is fantastic but I don't think it's enough to compete with Intel's x86/64 architecture (and Xeon microarchitecture). I agree that Intels are overgrown for simple stuff like that but there's no other option. You either make the general commodity cheap or increase the cost across the board for specialized designs. The question is though, until ARM chips are as hefty as Intel's, is this legacy overhead from personal computing enough to wipe out Intel's advantage over ARM longterm? I.e., if ARM can't get yields as good as Intel's (which means that ARM's silicon chips have to be smaller in physical size), this lack of overhead might be outweighed by the overhead of communicating between more processors or running more operating systems per [whatever] of computing power.