We've all savaged Calxeda's blogpost now, but it's worth noting the positive sides too.
• It looks like the real world power savings will be something like 66%. I know hosting facilities that base your bill on your watts. That looks like a powerful incentive.[1]
• Virtualization is nice (#1), but if you aren't a big enough fish to own all the slices you are at the mercy of your box mates and the financial pressures of your hosting company. If you have your own ARM server you get to live in a predictable world.
• Virtualization is nice (#2), but isn't there an embargoed Xen interdomain security flaw right now? How long have bad people known about it? Is your hosting provider in on the loop to get the fixes before they become public?
• For small sites, it doesn't matter what the efficiency of a Xeon at full load is. You won't get there with a dedicated machine, and you don't want to be on a virtual server that goes there.
• It looks like the boards actually have 10gbit interfaces. The 1gbit limit was either architectural to get to the client machines or deliberate to keep the Xeon in the same ballpark. Either way, it is reasonable for sites that aren't going to have more than a 1gbit drop anyway.
• 48 of these quad core ARM systems fit in a 2U box.
I'd much rather have a dedicated ARM than the tiny slices of Xeons that I use now. I don't need a random performance problem brought on by anyone other than myself.
EOM
[1] It may be that if your workload is network bound you won't be offered wattage based pricing. That might eliminate this savings for the people that could best use it.
• It looks like the real world power savings will be something like 66%. I know hosting facilities that base your bill on your watts. That looks like a powerful incentive.[1]
• Virtualization is nice (#1), but if you aren't a big enough fish to own all the slices you are at the mercy of your box mates and the financial pressures of your hosting company. If you have your own ARM server you get to live in a predictable world.
• Virtualization is nice (#2), but isn't there an embargoed Xen interdomain security flaw right now? How long have bad people known about it? Is your hosting provider in on the loop to get the fixes before they become public?
• For small sites, it doesn't matter what the efficiency of a Xeon at full load is. You won't get there with a dedicated machine, and you don't want to be on a virtual server that goes there.
• It looks like the boards actually have 10gbit interfaces. The 1gbit limit was either architectural to get to the client machines or deliberate to keep the Xeon in the same ballpark. Either way, it is reasonable for sites that aren't going to have more than a 1gbit drop anyway.
• 48 of these quad core ARM systems fit in a 2U box.
I'd much rather have a dedicated ARM than the tiny slices of Xeons that I use now. I don't need a random performance problem brought on by anyone other than myself.
EOM
[1] It may be that if your workload is network bound you won't be offered wattage based pricing. That might eliminate this savings for the people that could best use it.