Has no one learned the Calxeda lesson?
1. There's no price benefit over x86 CPUs: this comparison "Intel = $2000", "32-core ARM = $800" is ridiculous. Intel's cost is maybe $200, Ampere's cost is maybe $1000. If there's one thing Intel excels at is economies of scale for a general-purpose CPU.
2. The entire benefit of ARM is being a system-on-chip. So you can integrate it with specific peripherals or specific hardware offloads relevant for your application. E.g. you can create a dedicated CPU for AI or for databases or for storage. *Not* having anything specific on the ARM server makes it a general purporse CPU where it will always lose to the Intel. That's why Calxeda, well-funded, failed abysmally, and Annapurna, with zero marketing, became the back-bone of AWS. Annapurna integrated the ARM CPU to a NIC and specific hardware offloads to solve a specific problem. Calxeda was a general purpose CPU.
3. There are many CPU performance benchmarks yet none are mentioned here. A 32-core ARM even at the same clock will lose to the more sophisticated Intel because of the complexity of the Intel pipeline, the way its integrated into L1/L2/L3 caching, extremely intensive investment into PCIe/DDR/etc. Am I wrong? Where's the benchmark comparing this CPU to the Intel?
4. So this startup I never heard of wants to succeed where *Qualcomm* failed? Please. What is the innovation here?