Clearly riscv servers you design from the CPU up (with some very helpful software). Only to be replaced by the N types of computers that typically wind up being designed somewhere around years 3-5. To later be replaced by those same systems in the cloud.

Or of course world war 3 happens and the latest, greatest thing going in IT is “I mean I’m still alive, whatever that’s worth.” And making anything usable from whatever is found. Even a blinking LED becomes either neat or a way for a roving warboy to find/kill you.

Speaking of cyclical IT, my estimate is going “forward” to the terminal/mainframe-esque concept of simple and cheap “terminals” aka laptops that you use to log into a much beefier “mainframe” aka cloud workstation. I’m at a FAANGMULA and I’ve been using a cloud workstation from my cheap laptop as my daily driver for months now. The VM is so much higher-spec’d than what they would have bought me for a desktop. Just don’t look at the price if you plan to run it 24/7…

They already are: with these on-prem versions of the common public clouds.

Just recently moved all my services that don't need a 100% to a dedicated server instead of several cloud VMS running containers. It's cheaper, less overhead, simpler to configure and works just as well (so far)

Wouldn't surprise me if RPi style single board computers do start making headway as "microservers".

Instead of renting a VM or running docker containers you rent a small physical server for each service.

“Locally hosted cloud infrastructure!”