These things look awesome, but are pretty expensive, still. I'd love to put an ARM server in my homelab, but the price range between 100$ (RPi & Co) and 10000$ (enterprise server) seems pretty empty right now :/
For a thousand bucks of CPU, motherboard and RAM, anyone with a modicum of clue building x86-64 industry standard PC hardware could set up something based on Ryzen that runs circles around that. Probably at least quadruple the performance in any integer or floating point benchmarks.
I think that's the processor only? I'm basing that off the paragraph after the table, which says:
> AMD’s EPYC 7742 which still comes in at $6950
A couple quick searches (Amazon, Newegg) show people selling the CPU-only for this price. Since that's the price they're comparing to the table, I think the table prices are for the ARM CPU only.
I built my home compute cluster out of four Odroid N2. These are $80 ARM based single board computers (SBC's), similar to Raspberry Pi's. You can bridge the gap between high and low ends buy buying low end and scaling horizontally.
The troublesome piece is, of course, the horizontal scaling. For a cluster of ARM CPUs to be worthwhile, you need a job that can be parallelized, but not so massively parallel that it already runs on a GPU.
Even so, I think there's a lot of potential for these low end ARM devices. Ultimately, their impact on x86 could be the same as what x86 did to the previous generation of mini computers.
I'll believe these are a real viable thing for ordinary open source Linux/BSD developers, when I can go buy a $150 motherboard and a $250 CPU from newegg, that have performance anywhere NEAR what I can do with the equivalent priced Ryzen. Or even some Intel 10th/11th generation core-whatever i5/i7 CPU.
The problem with most of these is availability of a Linux operating system image that is as mature, and close to 'stock' debian as raspbian is. Usually it's some two year old version of Ubuntu that's been cobbled together by the vendor.
I believe there's been some work in the this space by the Armbian[1] community, which is aiming to create a unified base distro for a wide range of ARM single-board computers including Odroid, Pine64, etc.
That’s useful if you’re not averse to MacOS. Given that Apple now deploys backdoors by default for their own apps which will always inevitably result in exploits, and turning their back on decades of computing history with no “legacy” < 64bit support, I find myself struggling with that choice.
Heck, my 2015 MBP is still running Mojave (and thankfully still receiving software updates)
The removing of 32bit support in Catalina was definitely a bad thing for many, who are using x86-Macs, but for someone interesting in an ARM-based Mac, shouldn't play a role.
Until it does. Some future MacOS may need support of some new architecture feature, then it'll be "better buy an Arm13 mac if you want to run MacOS 2023!". Apple doesn't have a very good track record about supporting their own old hardware in new MacOS releases. Several iMacs and MacMinis come to mind. Their past behaviour sets a benchmark for their future behaviour, and since there are no reliable assurances about their support roadmap, I'd think carefully...
What? Big Sur supports hardware that is at least 7 years old. Catalina goes back to 2012 (and still gets security updates). For an OS vendor that has yearly updates, they do a pretty good job of supporting older hardware.
True. It looks like the last PPC Macs were released in 2005 and were available through 2006 [1]. The last OS that supported them was Leopard, which got Security updates though 2009 [2].
Even better: Based on apples history High Sierra probably EOLs January 2021 and supports hardware all the way back to 2010. So that's a decade of hardware support which is pretty good.
> Given that Apple now deploys backdoors by default for their own apps which will always inevitably result in exploits
You're talking about the certificate revocation check that bypasses VPNs? That one is to prevent malware from being able to hijack and block certificate checks.
If you are just building a home lab server (ie. don't need a video card, well... usually), you can build a surprisingly powerful, inexpensive system. Probably in the $500-$1000 range depending on CPU choice.
Just like with xeon server hardware, you will need to wait 4-6 years for companies to retire their fleets. r730s are currently reasonably priced (under $1K) but those were released new in 2014. R740s are still a few thousand dollars.
Why would you want a 6-year-old server chip? By that point
I'd expect a mid-tier consumer chip to have better performance/watt, and much better support for peripherals.
