I'm hoping for RISC-V to come through, because it has a chance to commodify even further than OpenPOWER could (due to exercising somewhat less control at the point of control for the trademark, and having a design which will suit more levels of designers, possibly allowing designers to enter new markets more readily). That said, the current POWER designs perform very well, so they might be a good interim solution for me.
RISC-V may do that tomorrow, but Arm servers are doing that today. You how a wide range of solutions with different CPUs in a variety of formats and compute power, from uCPE and IOT gw boxes all the way to high-density OCP designs with terabytes of RAM and a hundred cores...all compatible at the software and firmware level.
Let me know when an affordable arm board with ecc support comes along, wholesale or “call for price” not allowed. Because as it stands it might as well be sparc or mips in how accessible the hardware is.
Also, calling is easy. https://www.phoenicselectronics.com will sell you a Gigabyte MT30-GS2 (Cavium ThunderX 32-core) 1U system for around $2k. If you want to provide your own ATX case - much less.
Hardware is accessible, but there are a lot of big players buying things en masse, and the market isn’t oversaturated. This means long lead times and some price fluctuations. But things have been getting much better with every year (out of Arm servers’s whole 3 years of public availability). Definitely more accessible than anything OpenPower (which sadly will set you back the price of a small used Kia). The recent launch of third-gen Arm servers like the Qualcomm Centriq will lower the price for older kit.
Incidentally, still the only Cortex-A72 design out there. And for what you get, the A8040 and A7040-based solutions have a ridiculous low max power consumption of like 30-20 Watts.
