(08-22-2020, 01:06 AM)ashleymills Wrote: Thanks for the response, that's really interesting. It really is astounding how power-efficient ARM based chips are.There is huge potential in datacenters because of that. The always sell you their services as "running on green energy" but what they don't say how power guzzling typical servers are. Its really mindboggling. People blame airlines for climate change, but when looking at the CO2 footprint and overall energy use, then datacenters are actually much worse globally.
(08-22-2020, 01:06 AM)ashleymills Wrote: I didn't realise people had starting making progress towards these kind of boards. I'm guessing you wouldn't be able to plug a graphics card into the PCI-e slots at this time, as presumably the drivers wouldn't be compiled for ARM?At least AMD GPUs have open source drivers via the Linux Kernel/Mesa. The upcoming Intel stand alone GPUs also. Hence some potential hardware issues aside, both should run on ARM boards running Linux. For Nvidia cards there is the open-source Nouveau driver, but it isn't working very well due to the way Nvidia locks down their GPUs.
Edit: as for the actual topic. These custom ARM server SOCs are sadly prohibitively expensive. As nice as it would be to get your hands as a "normal" consumer on these, I think approaches like the Clusterboard using multiple consumer grade cheap SOCs are more realistic for PINE64.