Most powerful Xeon is the 28 core Platinum 2180 at $10k RSP and >200W TDP. Due to the nature of Intel turbo boost it almost always operates at TDP under load. Our ARM is the Centriq 2452 at less than $1400 RSP, 46 cores and 120W TDP, that it never hits. Beats Xeon 9/10 workloads.
I just hope that thanks to large companies like CloudFlare buying large numbers of ARM servers their prices finally start going down to a reasonable level.
There is a big chance, that whatever cloudflare is doing on that machine, is massive parallel and simple.
Well it took decades...
It is taking decades at this rate. Or at least a decade.
Not to long ago when Intel was yanking the rug out from under the SPARC and POWER and MIPS and $RANDOM_PROPRIETARY_MAINFRAME_CISC datacenter marketshares.
To be honest I am very much surprised at how cheap Qualcomm are selling their chip.
This is going to be the start of avalanche. Once the software improves and make a self sustainable ecosystem, everything else will come. I still dont believe Qualcomm could achieve their 5% Server target by 2020 goal. But it is still a good start in longer terms success.
What is more worrying is Intel's growth and Cash Cow is now at risk in the mid term. It will be interesting to see how Intel react to this. There is serious price pressure from AMD EPYC and Qualcomm Centriq. Intel DC 2018 may ship lower unit YoY and lower revenue / unit YoY. PC market is being attacked by AMD, while not at risk, Intel is definitely earning less as they increase core count.
Personally I would have liked to see POWER9 or RISC-V in server space, but both still missing in action.