How many of those precompiled binaries are performance critical? How about all?

From the software that runs for hours to compile a model, the software that calculates results, to the interactive analysis software that needs to load GBs of data.

The whole reason to run these things on a server farm is that you need large and fast machines that are better shared to make sure they get optimal use of the machine and of the license pool.

Is this the archetypal AWS customer that drives the majority of intel’s sales to AMZN? That not only has lock-in with a closed source vendor, but that vendor is not agile enough to give ARM binaries for AWS workloads? Doubtful IMO. Maybe for EDA and CAD/CAM setups, but somehow I doubt those are enough to keep Intel as we know them afloat. Intel has huge reason to fear ARM on the server.

I was thinking about server farms in general, not AWS specifically. You’re probably right that AWS-type server are more likely to skew towards software that is available in source form.

A commercial EDA tool was one of the use cases benchmarked in the source article.