ARM has some spiffy stuff, but it's not what the big data centers are looking for. There is posts about the Apple CPUs that are out. Nice stuff and if I was building a phone, it would be one of my top choices. But if I'm doing data center then I'm going to want something more general purpose. If I have 6 cores in a chip and they are all the same I can load them up. If I have CPU and GPU cores then I have to move tasks around.

If I move to ARM from Intel then I have the added task of trying to optimize my load/task to the new CPU. Granted compilers are a key driver, but lots of people have spent lots of time hand tweaking Intel CPU loads.

22 cores running at 2.2GHz in a single socket is pretty amazing. Haven't seen any ARM72's anywhere near that big.

You might see some movement in this area, but the way companies are gobbling big servers, we are not at peak Intel.

Hope that helps.

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the idea that the processes running on this system aren't going to be memory bandwidth starved. Yes, I know the Xeons have gobs of cache in multiple levels, but still. And yes, I know that distributing tasks across multiple systems can have its own severe performance problems.

I think the point is that you're pretty much by definition at the peak when your market share is 99.3%. There's nowhere to go.

"The hypothetical point in time when the global production of x86 equipment reaches its maximum rate, after which production will gradually decline." is the one that I'm using. As long as the demand is up there, then production will continue to grow.

The version of this story I saw was based on Geekbench scores. Browsing Geekbench results, I noticed that identical CPUs had scores that varied by huge amounts, as much as 2x. That may be a reflection of a real phenomenon, but it's not what I expect from a "CPU benchmark."

Geekbench also claims to model real-world applications, and I wonder what that means for comparing a phone and a laptop. Obviously there aren't so many apps that run the same way on both platforms. I wouldn't have any trouble believing, for example, that the CPU and video display system on a phone were superbly and efficiently integrated, far more so than in a desktop or laptop, and that would show up in an application benchmark. But I'd be surprised if a phone CPU can really get through many threads of branchy code faster than a big high-consumption part with giant caches can.

Anyway, I'm dubious about the Geekbench thing and I wonder if there are other measurements you have in mind.

Consuming your own output isn't good for margins, and like many large-scale providers, you must acknowledge vanity hardware isn't any faster than bare motherboards in a rack. The more bare-bones the better.

The XServe and friends were intended for small-scale deployments. They did a few partnerships to build clusters of them for HPC but that was largely a demonstration, not a target customer base.

Before the Xserve there was the Apple Network Server https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Network_Server

Intel has a huge competitive advantage here in the bulk of the market, but ARM will find an opening as well. They'll probably coexist for some time.

I don't know about that. I recently switched from Apple hardware to chromebook hardware because the chromebook was under $200. I just couldn't justify the extra cost.

There's no indication of a switch to ARM-only from any vendor I'm aware of. Lenovo et al. are still releasing new x86-based Chromebooks.

Proprietary hardware is a hard sale for anyone these days but in Apple's case it's even harder because their previous attempts left many shops with a disinclination to ever use them again. It'd take a serious commitment to forget the era where you had to beg for OS X Server bugfixes by saying they were preventing the purchase of n Macs.