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I wonder how this will affect Cavium's ThunderX line. When Applied Micro was bought by Macom, their X-Gene line was more or less trashed. If this keeps happening to companies trying to develop ARM servers, you'll never see an ARM server in a datacenter.

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ThunderX 2 seems to be quite competitive already, even though it's more than a year old at this point:

https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/11/13/cray-arms-highest-en...

I would imagine ThunderX was the primary reason why Marvell bought Cavium, but I'm not sure how committed and competent Marvell is with ARM chips these days, so hopefully this acquisition isn't for the worst.

Remember though that X-Gene wasn't very good when examined. And the current ThunderX is actually the continuation of the very interesting (and canceled by) Broadcom Vulcan, not the mediocre original.

Oh I'm well aware -- the lab I work in bought a couple of X-Gene 1s for testing, and even an X-Gene 2. They were complete and utter crap performance- and power-wise -- but they were (at the time) the only thing available.

Didn't know that about the ThunderX -- fascinating! Thanks!

I wouldn't expect much from ThunderX(1). Qualcomm Amberwing or Cavium ThunderX2 are where it's at for Xeon-like performance.

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