arm is very primed to take a lot of market share of server market from intel. Amazon is already very committed on making their graviton arm cpu their main cpu, which they own a huge lion share of the server market on alone.
for consumers, arm adoption is fully reliant on the respective operating systems and compatibility to get ironed out.
Linux works great on ARM, I just want something similar to most mini-ITX boards (4x SATA, 2x mini-PCIe, and RAM slots), and I’ll convert my DIY NAS to ARM. But there just isn’t anything between RAM-limited SBCs and datacenter ARM boards.
Eh, it looks like ARM laptops are coming along. I give it a year or so for the process to be smooth.
For servers, AWS Graviton seems to be pretty solid. I honestly don’t need top performance and could probably get away with a Quartz64 SBC, I just don’t want to worry about RAM and would really like 16GB. I just need to server a dozen or so docker containers with really low load, and I want to do that with as little power as I can get away with for minimum noise. It doesn’t need to transcode or anything.
arm is a mixed bag. iirc atm the gpu on the Snapdragon X Elite is disabled on Linux, and consumer support is reliant on how well the hardware manufacturer supports it if it closed source driver. In the case of qualcomm, the history doesnt look great for it
Eh, if they give me a PCIe slot, I’m happy to use that in the meantime. My current NAS uses an old NVIDIA GPU, so I’d just move that over.
Datacenter cpus are actually really good for NASes considering the explosion of NVMe storage. Most consumer CPUs are limited to just 5 m.2 drives and a 10gbit NIC. But a server mobo will open up for 10+ drives. Something cheap like a first gen Epyc motherboard gives you a ton of flexibility and speed if you’re ok with the idle power consumption.
if you’re ok with the idle power consumption
I’m kind of not. I don’t need a ton of drives, and I certainly don’t need them to be NVMe. I just want 2-4 SATA drives for storage and 1-2 NVMe drives for boot, and enough RAM to run a bunch of services w/o having to worry about swapping. Right now my Ryzen 1700 is doing a fine job, but I’d be willing to sacrifice some performance for energy savings.
Yeah, I manage the infrastructure for almost 150 WordPress sites, and I moved them all to ARM servers a while ago, because they’re 10% or 20% cheaper on AWS.
Websites are rarely bottlenecked by the CPU, so that power efficiency is very significant.
I really think that most people who think that they want ARM machines are wrong, at least given the state of things in 2024. Like, maybe you use Linux…but do you want to run x86 Windows binary-only games? Even if you can get 'em running, you’ve lost the power efficiency. What’s hardware support like? Do you want to be able to buy other components? If you like stuff like that Framework laptop, which seems popular on here, an SoC is heading in the opposite direction of that – an all-in-one, non-expandable manufacturer-specified system.
But yours is a legit application. A non-CPU-constrained datacenter application running open-source software compiled against ARM, where someone else has validated that the hardware is all good for the OS.
I would not go ARM for a desktop or laptop as things stand, though.
If you didn’t want to game on your laptop, would an ARM device not be better for office work? Considering they’re quiet and their battery lasts forever.
