Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons

Re:Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons by gpderetta on Thursday June 02, 2016 @06:24AM (#11821442)

The problem with comoditization is that margins become razor thin, which in turn means less money to invest in R&D, which means that it is hard for a company that isn't already there to come up with high performance (or even entry level, really) server solutions.

Intel ate the server market in the late '90/eary '00 thanks to the fat margins it had on the desktop.

That's not currently the case in the ARM world were only Apple and maybe Qualcomm have the needed margins, and Apple currently doesn't seem interested in the server market.

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Re:Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons by bhouston on Thursday June 02, 2016 @11:53AM (#11823515)

If ARM is providing the expensive R&D-based IP, then any licensee can be a competitor.

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Re:Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons by gpderetta on Thursday June 02, 2016 @03:47PM (#11825484)

But AFAIK ARM hasn't provided any server specific design. Most ARM based server attempts so far have been with custom designs (e.g. AppliedMicro X-Gene).

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Re:Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons by bhouston on Thursday June 02, 2016 @04:51PM (#11825951)

Give it time, why wouldn't ARM start offering server building blocks? There is obviously a market for it. ARM went to 64 bit, and it has just gone to advanced GPU designs. It supports extreme number of cores now too. Server-centric designs can not be far off.

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Re:Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons by gpderetta on Thursday June 02, 2016 @05:13PM (#11826118)

While ARM Holdings reference processors are reasonably good, the company is specialized in low power designs. Apple for example had to do a custom design to get the high performance ARM it needed. It is not obvious that ARM has the knowledge, the money and even the will to pursue a server design.

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