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Can you meaningfully benchmark stuff in the cloud? It seems to make any claims on price/performance you'd want to use two local servers dedicated to the benchmark, with as near identical hardware as possible (apart from the CPUs of course), and you'd want to know the full cost of both servers.

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You can benchmark using bare metal instances to eliminate noisy neighbours, and then you can meaningfully benchmark against other types of instance from the same cloud provider to get a relative cost benefit. I'd agree that obtaining the cost benefit in terms of on prem hardware is a much more involved calculation.

If you run things in cloud it makes sense to benchmark that?

Sure - you're benchmarking something a bit different from whether ARM is ready for "server dominance". You're essentially benchmarking Amazon's prices to early adopters of ARM vs the cutthroat x86 cloud marketplace. That may be interesting for many people but tells you little about ARM hardware.

You can't benchmark "server dominance".

You can benchmark what you just described, plus piece other pieces of the puzzle together, like Nuvia Series-A, and then extrapolate from that.

At the end it's still my opinion, I don't have a crystal ball =)

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