[Info-vax] OpenVMS Potential Platform of Interest: Intel NUCs

[John Dallman]

In article <t9rtod$kfv$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, chris-nospam at tridac.net (chris)
wrote:

> HP are just about to release a Proliant class server on multicore
> arm, which will probably be competitive on price compared to X86.
> Looks interesting, as arm base servers have never achieved critical
> mass, but that could change with commodity machines like the RL380.
> 
> https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/06/29/hpe-is-the-first-big-oem-to-
> adopt-ampere-computing-arm-chips/
> 
> RiscV laptops soon as well, so starting to get interesting again...

ARM64 servers have significant traction in cloud services. I ported the
mathematical modeller that I work on to ARM Linux late last year, because
some customers want to run it on Amazon Cloud. When you have datacentres
on the Amazon scale, cooling them becomes a major problem. The better
performance-per-watt of ARM has seen Amazon design and deploy three
generations of their "Graviton" cores for their own use. 

They get people to use ARM-based cores by simply charging less money for
them per hour. They also charge less for running their own Linux than
they do for running RHEL or SLES. A lot of what gets run on those ARM
cores is Python, Java, Javascript, or other languages that don't need
specialised software ported to ARM, but people are starting to do that
porting. 

/If/ VMS becomes popular in cloud-based deployments, expect customer
demand for an ARM64 version quite rapidly. This should be easier than the
x86 port, because LLVM is fully available on ARM, and not much in the way
of new methods will need to be created. 

John