These are very cheap pieces of hardware. Price up a HP Proliant with multiple 8 core Xenons and see how crazy that pricing gets, not to mention the power usage. Pricing is good right now for ARM. The question is does ARM work for what you're computing? According to this article, ARM is probably best for high thoroughput and high RAM solutions, not necessarily number crunching:
Mind you, those dual Xenons its competing against go for anywhere between $7,000 to $3,000 each. That's just the CPU street price before the HP/Dell markup and, of course, the rest of the server. Ask a VAR what a dual or quad E5-2699 v3 or current v4's goes for. You're probably looking at a $25,000 to maybe even $50,000 box here.
https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/arm-servers.html
The 'big dog' avantek sells right now seems to be this 384 core 2U solution at around $15,000.
https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/avantek-384-core-cavium-thun...
These are very cheap pieces of hardware. Price up a HP Proliant with multiple 8 core Xenons and see how crazy that pricing gets, not to mention the power usage. Pricing is good right now for ARM. The question is does ARM work for what you're computing? According to this article, ARM is probably best for high thoroughput and high RAM solutions, not necessarily number crunching:
https://www.servethehome.com/exclusive-first-cavium-thunderx...
Mind you, those dual Xenons its competing against go for anywhere between $7,000 to $3,000 each. That's just the CPU street price before the HP/Dell markup and, of course, the rest of the server. Ask a VAR what a dual or quad E5-2699 v3 or current v4's goes for. You're probably looking at a $25,000 to maybe even $50,000 box here.