[GTALUG] life expectancy of 32-bit x86 [was Re: Fedora Netinstall] [long]

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 08:56:54PM -0500, Jamon Camisso via talk wrote:
> I think you can buy Cavium ThunderX systems if you get in touch with the
> distributor in Canada. We have some of their systems in the US for arm64
> build farm purposes.

I think now you can, but even a year or two ago, good luck.

I think the most powerful I managed to get my hands on was an 8 core
64bit A53 reference board from Freescale (NXP?  Qualcomm?) but that was
a pain to try to work with because the network ports were totally weird
and non standard and kernel support was not integrated yet.

> But yes, the long promised ARM in the datacentre thing seems to remain
> just that, a promise with no major channel resellers or anyone offering
> much in terms of product.
> 
> HP tried high density ARM servers with its Moonshot blades, but it seems
> like that effort died off in 2014 as soon as it started, and the whole
> HP/HPE thing the next year probably didn't help.

Also a box full of independant small 32 bit arm servers was not what
people wanted.  They wanted large single image multicore 64 bit arm
servers.

-- 
Len Sorensen