I bought one of these. Unfortunately due to supply-chain holdup the order is pending indefinitely. The primary use-case is as a core router for high-throughput networks like ISP backbones, hence the focus on built-in SFP+ which would usually need an array of PCIe cards to accomplish on a standard box. But you can also use it as a NAS which is how I intend to because of the 4x SATA. Both of these use cases require only moderate CPU power and benefit from the ECC support.
I'm keen on an ARM workstation. I do all my dev work on Linux and deploy everything to Linux hosts. AWS offers ARM hosts at half the cost of amd64 ones, you can cross compile but I would be happier if my build box was the same processor.
What might work is some kind of local headless cloud machine running a pile of VMs until somebody builds something I can hang two big monitors off. Laptops are too constraining.
- If such an initiative succeeded, the developer side of the fence would lose ground somewhere, because Amazon.
- It would never actually happen in the first place, because ARM is so fast-moving now that everyone's doing everything they can to maintain their first-mover advantage, which of course includes being as secretive as possible.
- In the ideal case where an engineer actually
considered the situation, it would be all too easy (given the iteration that's happening right now) for them to counter-argue that it makes the most sense to just buy the Altera kit available on the retail market because it's technically the closest to what Amazon are using internally.
The evolutionary focus is entirely on servers because of the appreciable overheads associated with that market that can be tapped into to drive the R&D process - especially given the chip shortages at the moment. Inn the same vein, there are not likely to be any consumer-class implementations (or new products) until the supply chain has had a chance to figure itself out, which is probably not going to happen for a while.
This is a shame for a lot of reasons. Chiefly that I would really like a graviton2 local server to get as close to replicating the metal my server will run on. Perhaps Amazon could just ship a PCI card with a system on it or something like that.
Its interesting to me that all of a sudden amd64 seems like a legacy system. I can hear the fan in my old proliant dev server from here and while I am somewhat sentimental about it, its definitely time to move on, preferably withou Apple involved. Maybe its time to start a 1980s style workstation company again.
Ha, I would not be surprised if a lot of the related iteration work is done via PCI(-e). Those cards are probably a) already being made and are well-understood, and b) part of an accepted single-order-quantity cycle, which would mean the runway needed to iterate a few more times to make the card releasable would theoretically not only be that hard to justify but be able to reuse existing processes.
I feel like the amd64 legacy (and x86 in general) will maybe be like IPv4. Itanium, OpenSPARC, SH4, MIPS, Coldfire, etc (incl. many more I'm forgetting) all eked out a living for a while after they "died" as platforms, while others like POWER are still around. x86 on the other hand has been the leading-edge architecture for virtually all client and server applications on for literally 40 years, without missing a beat. That graph has been pinned at pretty much 100% for that entire time.
So, yeah, the ARM revolution is here, but even in a world where Intel and AMD pivoted all their advertising to ARM, the x86 industry would still have enough ecosystem-driven momentum to continue to stay pegged at 100% for probably another 15-20 years. But that's not the reality - Intel and AMD aren't going to pivot away from all the contracts and partnerships and carefully nurtured deals and stuff they've hard won over the years, so there's definitely going to be continued life in the platform.
Or at least that's my mental model, which absolutely does not account for network effects.
This being said, the relative openness of the ARM licensing situation, along with the fact that the architecture hasn't fully matured in terms of peripheral and chipset configuration and whatnot, makes ARM a very very interesting platform to do exactly what you mention regarding 1980s-esque "industrial-scale experiment" type computing. I actually got bitten by precisely this bug a little while ago :) and have been noodling over the subject ever since.
Sadly, virtually every existing enterprise out there would probably fear such an idea as anything other than an eyes-only thought experiment, and I feel it would be ideologically impossible to fully convince security-conscious customers of the foundational integrity of the systems' roots of trust if I went down the VC route, even if every investor was a unicorn :/
