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.