David Kanter (dkanter@realworldtech.com) on 1/5/12 wrote:
---------------------------
>George Baker (george_baker@yahoo.com) on 1/4/12 wrote:
>---------------------------
>>Intel's announced pricing for dual-socket 8-core SandyBridge-EP ranges from $1106
>>(1.8 GHz) to $2057 (2.9 GHz) per chip!
>
>That sounds about right.
>
>>There is little benefit of x86 compatibility
>>in servers
>
>What makes you say that? Have you ever tried to run SQL server on PowerPC? Or VMware?
>
>x86 compatibility is fairly useful.


Only if you want to run Windows, which is a distinct minority of the server images out there. To be sure there is certainly some platform familiarity that's useful even if you're running Linux, but for many people it's not an issue.

There are millions of hosted web servers alone that could fairly easily be ARM instead of x86, so long as the costs work out right. Unfortunately for ARM, single socket x86 systems are pretty cheap. ARM is also a bit short of virtualization support at the moment, but Xen ARM should be available this year.