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Actually, where I see interest in the enterprise for ARM is in the "Just enough hardware" segment. Sure a quad core is cheap. But a room full of them draws a lot of power and requires a lot of cooling. There are plenty of cases where a server is needed but anything x86 you would buy is likely overkill. I don't see ARM replacing x86, but supplementing it.
Edited 2012-11-14 19:01 UTC
The problem is that dealing with a few ARM related bugs or issues will offset any power savings. There are enough issues with running LAMP stacks on alternative distros, toss in the ARM factor and the problem becomes exponentially worse.
I could see a company like Google looking into ARM since they run server farms and manage their own OS but don't expect the typical corp to have any interest. ARM power savings are more meaningful to mobile devices, for servers you're talking about turning off a few lightbulbs. It's peanuts for the typical corp.




Member since:
2012-06-22
Enterprise would prefer all servers to be x86 which is a big reason why Sun went tits up.
There are enough problems as it is with software fragmentation, tossing ARM into the mix only compounds it.
As I have said before server hardware is a solved problem. A $200 quad core cpu is a solved problem. It's peanuts in cost compared to software and administration. Big corps don't even look at the price of the cpu, they hand a company like Dell a blank check when it's time to upgrade.
Edited 2012-11-14 17:16 UTC