While I like this idea, I think supporting a full x86-64 instruction set for high-performance applications, from scratch, is likely years out. This company will need a 10-year runway to see any market impact.
In any case, they don't mention any secret sauce. Intel has strong channels, fabs and the x86-64 ISA with massive software compatibility on the server side. Even with better performance/power, Intel can simply undercut the competition to drive them out of business. If Qualcomm's sales channels couldn't dent the server space, I am sceptical about upstarts, unless their [power, performance, cost] is significantly better than Intel.
However, unifying the memory models sounds like a performance disaster for the ARM code. And having multiple decoders in hardware (as well as having enough of them) doesn't seem like a justifiable use of silicon real estate.
Also note that the x86 memory model is a perfectly valid implementation for an ARM chip, as it's a superset of the ARM memory model constraints. And the performance impact isn't that big really.
Even Windows runs on Arm now
For servers they care about price, performance, support and volume/availability
If you can have a non-x86 platform that will save power/cooling to the big datacenter users (FAANG basically) they will be willing to give you money
https://www.techspot.com/review/1599-windows-on-arm-performa...
You only get to read this kind of stuff in HN.
ARM servers are extremely awful at all of these. Most ARM servers perform poorly compared to x86 servers, they have less software support and they require you to cross compile or switch your development machines to ARM as well and finally actually getting an ARM server is incredibly difficult because almost no one offers them and even those providers who offer some ARM instances don't give you the same variety as with x86. The worst part is that switching to ARM involves extra costs for your expensive developers in exchange for hardware that probably was already too cheap to care about because RAM has a much bigger impact on server costs than the CPU.
But if they can get an ARM server that checks those boxes the game may change.
> involves extra costs for your expensive developers
Which expensive developers? Web technologies run the same on ARM as on x86 (may I say it's even easier than developing for mobile - Node/Java/PHP/Python/etc run the same in ARM, Node might even benefit from optimizations done for ARM Chromium)