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Comment by MarkovChain242 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I would love to be able to buy an ARM server (or a RISC-V server), but so far that's just impossible.

Let's just limit the discussion to Ampere. There is supposed to be Gigabyte G242, with several SKUs, that supports an older version of their chips. I've had extensive email discussions with Gigabyte sales staff, and yet I've been unable to find a single reseller that will even backorder any version of the G242 for me. And there's even a G252 now. Lovely!

Yes, there is a supply chain crisis. Yes, ordering novel products is never easy, nor cheap. But, heck, do I understand why Intel has a lock on the server market...

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FWIW: https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-servers.html

Small unit count availability is still problematic for now.

For Ampere, there has been the AVA Developer Platform ($5450, 32-core) recently: https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ava-developer-platform but that's not a cheap solution.

Given the history of NVIDIA, will be really interesting to see what happens there too.

Not sure why you bring up NVIDIA, unless you don’t know that the ARM acquisition was cancelled.

They've got their own ARM server chip coming out anyhow.

Availability of their existing dev kits is at best spotty. The AGX Orin [0] dev kit is at least available for backorder at $2k USD - but I haven't seen any of the Xavier kits available for many many months...

[0] - https://www.arrow.com/en/products/945-13730-0000-000/nvidia

Yeah - strong supply constraints right now - side effect of what happened with GPUs... in the first half of 2020 Xavier devkits were very easy to buy at MSRP.

We'll see what happens...

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/taiwans-tech-titans-adopt...

Hey, Intel is trying to get into the foundry business, right? Wonder if Renee has any good contacts over there. Maybe they could dodge the supply chain issue. (Just kidding, I know switching fabs is a big project -- but I do sort of wonder if there was a missed opportunity here... Ampere needs some tricks up their sleeve if they want to compete with Amazon and their unlimited funds, right?).

It wouldn't be possible until around 2024, and regardless TSMC has a ridiculous ARM ecosystem. IFS is probably most competitive with RISC-V and licensed x86 cores rather than ARM. That said, IFS apparently does Graviton packaging, so maybe?

I think we are lock out cause of gigant-scalers (cloud providers) and labs maybe in few years we can get some cool ARM servers for cheap :P.

Do Microsoft/Amazon/Google sell their retired cloud hardware?

Not AFAIK, but Amazon's been selling Graviton 1 to Microtik.

If your talking about the CCR2116-12G-4S+, its a nice router with the AL73400, which is a 16 core A72 platform. OTOH, for a general purpose machine roughly in the same ballpark your probably better off with the NXP LX2160A on something like the solidrun honeycomb. The latter is more suited for general purpose compute given the pcie slot, sata, m.2 slot, pluggable ram, etc. Its also 16 A72's, with the advantage its a systemready certified platform.

But, those are really old generation parts given there are a number of A76 based systems appearing on the market. Those chips are a giant step above the A72 based machines the same way the A72 is a big step above the A5x ones. (aka its a gravaton1->gravaton2 kind of step, or the diff between atom and the mainstream i5/7 parts)

Edit: Notice the G1->G2 uplift in single threaded perf. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

That is going to be the uplift going from a A72->A76+ platform. The IPC is nearly 2x, and translates to going from a early 2000s era x86 to something fairly modern.

They do, but only commodity parts like cpus

Yep. Have bought some used servers off eBay that have look to be decommissioned Google servers.

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