Yeah the memory system and the processors in the Power8 box are
burning a ridiculous amount of power for a departmental class server.
If that's the best RISC has got the ARMy have no chance apart from niches.
The ARM based entries should do a lot better than Power8 boxes in
power consumption but they will likely trail Xeon and Power8 badly
in performance and will probably trail Xeon in performance/Watt.
Given the zero market share starting point and abysmal economy of
scale, the ARM entries will compete with Xeon pricing only to the
extent that the ARM chip vendors and/or their OEM partners want to
dump truckloads of cash down the drain quarter after quarter in the
hopes of establishing a beachhead for ARM in the server market.
I have yet to see any rationale to ARM based servers beyond the
fact that they aren't x86, Power, SPARC, or Itanium. Novelty alone
isn't really a buying factor for IT professionals.
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