James Hamilton from Amazon Web Services writes that AMD’s plans to build a 64 bit, 4-core, 2Ghz ARM processor points to a recurring trend in microservers.
Invariably what we see happening about once a decade is a high-volume, lower-priced technology takes over the low end of the market. When this happens many engineers correctly point out that these systems can’t hold a candle to the previous generation server technology and then incorrectly believe they won’t get replaced. The new generation is almost never better in absolute terms but they are better price/performers so they first are adopted for the less performance critical applications. Once this happens, the die is cast and the outcome is just about assured. The high-volume parts move up market and eventually take over even the most performance critical workloads of the previous generation. We see this same scenario play out roughly once a decade.
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