Anything that's COM Express is produced in very small quantities and is very expensive. I'll be shocked if it isn't 3 to 4x the cost of a single socket 8-core Ryzen that runs circles around it in performance.
the SolidRun Article on their Systemsready work:
https://www.solid-run.com/news/how-honeycomb-lx2k-and-system...
Its a form-factor specifically designed for server rooms: where you put ear-plugs in before entering the room. The money spent on the racks / physical infrastructure is small compared to the ongoing costs of actually powering or cooling the room
That said, you are absolutely correct that rackmount equipment is expensive by it's form-factor - but given this is a mini-itx board clearly not designed for use in a rackmounted chassis (given clearance for CPU cooling and orientation of the memory modules) it's not a factor here.
Not just that but 1U servers also use a fair percentage of their wattage moving air with 40mm fans. The hotter the TDP of all the electronics in your server is, the more air you need to move. 40x28mm high RPM 12VDC fans are quite inefficient in terms of a ratio of cubic meters of air moved per hour vs their watt-hours consumed.
In a 2U chassis if you can find a way to pack in multiple motherboards and use 60mm height fans the possible efficiencies are much greater.
If you look at the 'wall of fans' in the center of something like a Dell 1U dual socket system, there's eight or ten fans each of which if running at full speed can be an 8W to 10W load. This is necessary because you might have two 120W TDP CPUs under passive heatsinks that need a LOT of air pushed past them.
Additionally a stack of 30 or 40 1U servers each with its own discrete 110-240VAC input, DC output power supply is quite inefficient in large numbers. A fair bit of wattage is wasted to spinning the 40mm fan in the power supply and in the densely packed AC to DC conversion circuitry. This is one reason why things like the FB Open Compute platform servers are sometimes 1.5RU high (so they can use 60mm fans), and use a single large AC-to-DC power supply that can take in 277VAC (or even 480VAC!), and output 12VDC to 48VDC to each motherboard in the same rack cabinet.
Even 1-node in 2U is definitely getting into 220V dedicated outlets and dedicated buildings. 1U or 1/2U per node certainly exists, but you need to start spending a good amount of thought on power and cooling to actually support that kind of infrastructure.
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> If you look at the 'wall of fans' in something like a Dell 1U dual socket system, there's eight or ten fans each of which if running at full speed can be an 8W to 10W load. This is necessary because you might have two 120W TDP CPUs under passive heatsinks that need a LOT of air pushed past them.
That's possibly an advantage here. ARM's are known for lower power consumption, so maybe the fans can run slower (and therefore draw less power). I'd have to think about these specs more though...
A 2-node x 1U ARM server might work out if these ARM servers have very low power requirements in a very strong "horizontal scale-out" kind of setup.
But its still hard for me to think exactly what the use case would be. An I/O based server would probably be better in 4U: for 50 to 100 Hard Drives on a beefier 4U Xeon or 4U EPYC chassis.
So its one of those "what's the use" products. Under typical circumstances, a 2U or 4U beefy server split up into multiple VMs probably is a superior architecture.
But having more "tiny" physical machines that are mostly independent (maybe sharing a PSU, but otherwise a fully independent node) for "bare metal hosting" has some benefits over VMs. I mean... do you want a single dual-socket 128-core EPYC in 4U or do you want 8x16 ARMs in 1/2U each.
I dunno, I think the 128-core dual-socket 4U EPYC is gonna be better for cooling, power, and VM-flexibility. At least, that's my instinct. Unless you know that you absolutely want individual non-VM nodes.
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EDIT: The I/O options discussed here are exceptional. If low CPU-power but high I/O is needed (more SPF+ ports or whatever), then that's probably the ARM's advantage over a single dual-socket EPYC system.
EDIT2: 16x A72 seems weak. But 10Gbps SFP+ x4? That's... actually really really good. Might be hell to actually write software that takes advantage of all that bandwidth though.
Ordinarily in a x86-64 intel or AMD chipset server if you wanted 4 x 10Gbps SFP+, in addition to whatever NICs are on the motherboard, you'll end up using one of the Intel chipset, low-profile PCI-Express interface cards in a slot. Using some 1U long depth Dells as an example you might get a motherboard that has 2 x 1000BaseT and 2 x 10GbE SFP+ in daughtercard plugged into the motherboard, and then you'd have two or three low-profile PCIE slots to add more NICs. Or some combination like one full-height size PCIE slot and one low profile slot.