Am I being naive here? Isn't the whole point of virtualisation, that I can put 50 "average" VMs onto a top-end server, I can put 200 "small" VMs onto it, or 1000s of lightweight LXC containers.
What limitation are ARM micro-servers going to overcome? CPU bound tasks? No. Memory bound tasks? Well, with memory extension techniques, x86 can have huge quantities of memory, no not so much. So IO bound tasks? Maybe... Is there something else I missed?
Workload per watt? Power management in x86 processors, chipsets, and general server design is getting better all the time. Of course, there are things where FPGA's or ASICs will win every time... so what is it that I get with an ARM that I can't get with a FPGA + x86? Or is it more that ARM SoC + FPGA/ASIC is where things get attractive?
Memcached/redis sounds like something ARM CPUs might be good at.
Maybe execution performance predictability and better isolation of running a single instance on bare metal ARMv8 vs. a hypervisor running 50 instances on x86? In my experience, performance varies wildly on virtualized systems. Maybe x86 VM worst case can be worse than running on bare metal on ARM?
Anything where you need only a few instances and have relatively low performance requirements, like SOHO servers? I'd love to have something generic that consumes just a few watts but could do diverse tasks from routing, VPN, file serving, etc. at 500+ Mbps.
I guess it remains to be seen what kind of niche ARM servers will carve. I'm excited to try them out, to see how far they can be pushed.
What limitation are ARM micro-servers going to overcome? CPU bound tasks? No. Memory bound tasks? Well, with memory extension techniques, x86 can have huge quantities of memory, no not so much. So IO bound tasks? Maybe... Is there something else I missed?
Workload per watt? Power management in x86 processors, chipsets, and general server design is getting better all the time. Of course, there are things where FPGA's or ASICs will win every time... so what is it that I get with an ARM that I can't get with a FPGA + x86? Or is it more that ARM SoC + FPGA/ASIC is where things get attractive?