you can get an AMD A1100 dev kit, but it's like three grand.
I mean, obviously, that isn't a realistic price, but if you want an ARM server with ECC ram right now, that's one way to go. (my understanding is that once AMD ramps up production, which is looking less likely at this point, it will be on the order of a few hundred bucks.)
Most people actually doing things with ARM servers are using non-ecc ram, which I don't think is particularly practical for real world use. The problem with non-ecc is not that it fails more often; the problem with non-ecc is that you often don't know when it failed.
because this has been right around the corner for longer than I would expect. The big problem here is that AMD is fighting against a moving target. If they don't move and get the thing out the door soon, Intel will be out with a new chip, which will raise the bar further. Like a year and a half ago, when I was trying to get myself a dev kit, it looked like a really nice piece of kit that would provide a real advantage (above and beyond the novelty) over competing x86 offerings from intel, but that was before the v3 intel chips.
I mean, from a shallow evaluation, I think that if these things came out at the "couple hundred dollar" price point, they would be competitive right now. at $300 per for board+cpu, I'd buy 20 right now. But I'm not at all sure that will be true a year from now.
(Note, I'm entirely ecc, so we're not talking about atoms. There is a huge opportunity here because intel stunts it's e3 line to 32gib ram. AMD needs to get in and exploit this while the getting is good. Yes, the 4xxx CPUs don't have any such limit, but compared to the E3, they are pathetic. These ARM boards would give AMD a chance to offer a reasonable compute per watt in a package with a ram footprint that can crush the E3.)
But... it's a year and a half later, and I still see no sign of AMD actually selling the things, other than as engineering samples at engineering sample prices, and meanwhile, intel is improving their x86 lineup.
Maybe I'm just impatient, but I just don't have a lot of hope that by the time it is out it will be able to compete with virtualizing a big xeon box.
I mean, yes, there are some applications where you really want your own server, and the A1100, if it does ship before Intel releases the ram limits on the E3, could compete in that niche, but for ARM to really take off in the datacenter, it needs to be cheaper per unit work done than a big xeon box. E.g. I need to be able to replace one of my giant dual xeons with four or five of these puppies, and it needs to cost less over the life of the hardware.
I'm paying California prices for power, so it shouldn't be that hard, but I'm just really frustrated by the slow progress of the AMD ARM server (and ARM boards that support ECC in general.)
I mean, obviously, that isn't a realistic price, but if you want an ARM server with ECC ram right now, that's one way to go. (my understanding is that once AMD ramps up production, which is looking less likely at this point, it will be on the order of a few hundred bucks.)
Most people actually doing things with ARM servers are using non-ecc ram, which I don't think is particularly practical for real world use. The problem with non-ecc is not that it fails more often; the problem with non-ecc is that you often don't know when it failed.