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Comment by Sebb767 | Hacker News Reader

These things look awesome, but are pretty expensive, still. I'd love to put an ARM server in my homelab, but the price range between 100$ (RPi & Co) and 10000$ (enterprise server) seems pretty empty right now :/

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You can get SolidRun HoneyComb[0] for ~$1000, it has 16 cores with supposedly reasonable performance.

[0] https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h...

For a thousand bucks of CPU, motherboard and RAM, anyone with a modicum of clue building x86-64 industry standard PC hardware could set up something based on Ryzen that runs circles around that. Probably at least quadruple the performance in any integer or floating point benchmarks.

$659 ryzen 5800X

$250 motherboard

Reasonable, but not exciting. Cortex-A72 is quite old by now. Just compare EC2 a1 instances vs. the newer ones.

Just compare how much such an exciting AWS instance would cost in a month.

You can't compare it to owning a whole machine for several years, having bought it once.

That puppy is on my wish list if tax refunds are a thing this spring.

This looks what I was searching for. Thank you!

Do I read the table on https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review... incorrectly?

To me, it says they have a system with 32 CPUs at 1.7 GHz for $800, and a whole range between $2,200 and $4,050.

I think that's the processor only? I'm basing that off the paragraph after the table, which says:

> AMD’s EPYC 7742 which still comes in at $6950

A couple quick searches (Amazon, Newegg) show people selling the CPU-only for this price. Since that's the price they're comparing to the table, I think the table prices are for the ARM CPU only.

Thanks! I already found $800 cheapish, but didn’t consider it a price for just the CPU; my mind isn’t used to see server prices, it seems.

I built my home compute cluster out of four Odroid N2. These are $80 ARM based single board computers (SBC's), similar to Raspberry Pi's. You can bridge the gap between high and low ends buy buying low end and scaling horizontally.

The troublesome piece is, of course, the horizontal scaling. For a cluster of ARM CPUs to be worthwhile, you need a job that can be parallelized, but not so massively parallel that it already runs on a GPU.

Even so, I think there's a lot of potential for these low end ARM devices. Ultimately, their impact on x86 could be the same as what x86 did to the previous generation of mini computers.

I'll believe these are a real viable thing for ordinary open source Linux/BSD developers, when I can go buy a $150 motherboard and a $250 CPU from newegg, that have performance anywhere NEAR what I can do with the equivalent priced Ryzen. Or even some Intel 10th/11th generation core-whatever i5/i7 CPU.

There are several multi-board RPi&Co solutions. Pine64 has some interesting offerings in this space.

TuringPi 2 (for RPi CM4) https://turingpi.com/

Pine64 SOPINE Clusterboard https://www.pine64.org/clusterboard/

The problem with most of these is availability of a Linux operating system image that is as mature, and close to 'stock' debian as raspbian is. Usually it's some two year old version of Ubuntu that's been cobbled together by the vendor.

I believe there's been some work in the this space by the Armbian[1] community, which is aiming to create a unified base distro for a wide range of ARM single-board computers including Odroid, Pine64, etc.

[1] https://www.armbian.com/

Just wait for virtualization on M1 Mac.

That’s useful if you’re not averse to MacOS. Given that Apple now deploys backdoors by default for their own apps which will always inevitably result in exploits, and turning their back on decades of computing history with no “legacy” < 64bit support, I find myself struggling with that choice.

Heck, my 2015 MBP is still running Mojave (and thankfully still receiving software updates)

The removing of 32bit support in Catalina was definitely a bad thing for many, who are using x86-Macs, but for someone interesting in an ARM-based Mac, shouldn't play a role.

> shouldn't play a role.

Until it does. Some future MacOS may need support of some new architecture feature, then it'll be "better buy an Arm13 mac if you want to run MacOS 2023!". Apple doesn't have a very good track record about supporting their own old hardware in new MacOS releases. Several iMacs and MacMinis come to mind. Their past behaviour sets a benchmark for their future behaviour, and since there are no reliable assurances about their support roadmap, I'd think carefully...

What? Big Sur supports hardware that is at least 7 years old. Catalina goes back to 2012 (and still gets security updates). For an OS vendor that has yearly updates, they do a pretty good job of supporting older hardware.

https://eshop.macsales.com/guides/Mac_OS_X_Compatibility

The PowerPC->Intel transition led to an OSX release that was Intel only just three years after the first Intel hardware was released.

Apple's known for cutting compatibility when they have some goal that's served by it, or it's viewed as an albatross by their product side.

True. It looks like the last PPC Macs were released in 2005 and were available through 2006 [1]. The last OS that supported them was Leopard, which got Security updates though 2009 [2].

[1] https://everymac.com/systems/by_timeline/ultimate-mac-timeli...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#Release_histo...

Even better: Based on apples history High Sierra probably EOLs January 2021 and supports hardware all the way back to 2010. So that's a decade of hardware support which is pretty good.

> Given that Apple now deploys backdoors by default for their own apps which will always inevitably result in exploits

You're talking about the certificate revocation check that bypasses VPNs? That one is to prevent malware from being able to hijack and block certificate checks.

No, I’m talking about regular Apple apps that bypass local software firewalls.

See this HN thread from ~2 months ago for an introduction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816

This is new behaviour to Big Sur, breaking existing tooling and providing a back door for Apple, and anyone who can exploit it like this guy https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/1327726496203476992

If you are just building a home lab server (ie. don't need a video card, well... usually), you can build a surprisingly powerful, inexpensive system. Probably in the $500-$1000 range depending on CPU choice.

Just like with xeon server hardware, you will need to wait 4-6 years for companies to retire their fleets. r730s are currently reasonably priced (under $1K) but those were released new in 2014. R740s are still a few thousand dollars.

Why would you want a 6-year-old server chip? By that point I'd expect a mid-tier consumer chip to have better performance/watt, and much better support for peripherals.

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