08-25-2020, 01:42 PM
(08-22-2020, 02:05 AM)poVoq Wrote: 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.
We're still in a space where people are designing for very specific specifications (with little or no competition, depending on said specs) or building fairly early generations of a more standardized It workload. The more ARM server vendors say "we can run the same workload as Intel/AMD/Power for half the price" and provably show compatibility (this should absolutely be doable now for lots of heavily-ported mature OSS server applications, but a bit harder for closed-source commercial products), show great uptime specs, and scalability, the market will grow toward them over time, especially large hosting companies and if the I/O is strong, companies who work in big data) - but I still think the killer app for ARM, the thing that will make a big dent now, is scalability. Put out a line of ARM CPUs that can scale from IoT to massively parallel computing, with similar/same base code and people will want to move to your platform. The world's largest supercomputer is now running on Fujitsu's A64FX CPUs - that's right, ARM! It is absolutely doable and I am convinced there is a middle ground where modular design, open hardware specs and demand will bring us some pretty nifty consumer and small business machines. I'd say it's only a matter of time before smaller chipmakers start building more cores and faster I/O backends into these devices. Fujitsu is looking to sell smaller, less expensive machines with their A64FX chips, though I'd happily pay several hundred bucks one day if PINE can throw together something simple but powerful with similar features to the current SBCs, just with notably more power to them.
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it doesn't get happy
it doesn't get sad
it just runs programs
it doesn't get happy
it doesn't get sad
it just runs programs