Agreed. Power frugality is absolutely crucial, especially at larger, enterprise scale. Unless you're in HPC, you're looking for a good balance of peak performance-per-watt and the lowest idle consumption, with a very good scaling down story. ARM has long done a better job of this than x86. It's one of the main reasons the chipset has been absolutely dominant in the smartphone market.
The biggest single cost for AWS etc. is per-rack running costs, encompassing power, cooling etc. It's hard to overemphasise just how much this dwarfs all other costs. To optimise those costs you've got to cut down the power consumption and associated heat production.
The biggest single cost for AWS etc. is per-rack running costs, encompassing power, cooling etc. It's hard to overemphasise just how much this dwarfs all other costs. To optimise those costs you've got to cut down the power consumption and associated heat production.