The part with four 10Gbps ports is nice. I wish there were more mini-itx x86-64 server boards with such. The vast majority of mini-itx boards are not designed for front-to-back server airflow, and are intended/marketed more for consumer enthusiast small gaming PCs and stuff.
Ordinarily in a x86-64 intel or AMD chipset server if you wanted 4 x 10Gbps SFP+, in addition to whatever NICs are on the motherboard, you'll end up using one of the Intel chipset, low-profile PCI-Express interface cards in a slot. Using some 1U long depth Dells as an example you might get a motherboard that has 2 x 1000BaseT and 2 x 10GbE SFP+ in daughtercard plugged into the motherboard, and then you'd have two or three low-profile PCIE slots to add more NICs. Or some combination like one full-height size PCIE slot and one low profile slot.
Even 1-node in 2U is definitely getting into 220V dedicated outlets and dedicated buildings. 1U or 1/2U per node certainly exists, but you need to start spending a good amount of thought on power and cooling to actually support that kind of infrastructure.
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> If you look at the 'wall of fans' in something like a Dell 1U dual socket system, there's eight or ten fans each of which if running at full speed can be an 8W to 10W load. This is necessary because you might have two 120W TDP CPUs under passive heatsinks that need a LOT of air pushed past them.
That's possibly an advantage here. ARM's are known for lower power consumption, so maybe the fans can run slower (and therefore draw less power). I'd have to think about these specs more though...
A 2-node x 1U ARM server might work out if these ARM servers have very low power requirements in a very strong "horizontal scale-out" kind of setup.
But its still hard for me to think exactly what the use case would be. An I/O based server would probably be better in 4U: for 50 to 100 Hard Drives on a beefier 4U Xeon or 4U EPYC chassis.
So its one of those "what's the use" products. Under typical circumstances, a 2U or 4U beefy server split up into multiple VMs probably is a superior architecture.
But having more "tiny" physical machines that are mostly independent (maybe sharing a PSU, but otherwise a fully independent node) for "bare metal hosting" has some benefits over VMs. I mean... do you want a single dual-socket 128-core EPYC in 4U or do you want 8x16 ARMs in 1/2U each.
I dunno, I think the 128-core dual-socket 4U EPYC is gonna be better for cooling, power, and VM-flexibility. At least, that's my instinct. Unless you know that you absolutely want individual non-VM nodes.
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EDIT: The I/O options discussed here are exceptional. If low CPU-power but high I/O is needed (more SPF+ ports or whatever), then that's probably the ARM's advantage over a single dual-socket EPYC system.
EDIT2: 16x A72 seems weak. But 10Gbps SFP+ x4? That's... actually really really good. Might be hell to actually write software that takes advantage of all that bandwidth though.