Any processor that hopes to displace the Xeon as the engine of choice for general purpose compute has to do one of two things, and we would argue both: It has to be a relatively seamless replacement for a Xeon processor inside of existing systems, much as the Opteron was back in the early 2000s, and it has to offer compelling advantages that yield better performance per dollar per watt per unit of space in a rack.
The “Vulcan” ThunderX2 chips, at least based on the initial information that is available in the wake of their launch, appear to do that.
Different customers look at components of that performance per dollar per watt per unit of rack space differently, but all four are always a part of the equation even if one of them is zeroed out because money is no object (think high frequency trading) or space and therefore compute density is not a concern (a rural enterprise datacenter close to a major metropolitan area does not have the same pressure as a hyperscaler) or screaming performance is not required (and hence the fact that Intel sells so many middle bin parts to millions of companies each year).
For this reason, it is probably also a good sign that Cavium has cooked up over 40 different SKUs of the Vulcan chips for its initial launch, and stands in stark contrast with the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 line, which had a mere four SKUs at launch last fall and which may be in the process of being shut down or sold off by the world’s second largest maker of smartphone chips after Samsung Electronics.
Incidentally, both Samsung and Qualcomm had an urge, like so many others, to tap into datacenter profits with Arm server chips; Samsung never got off the drawing board before quitting, and Qualcomm has spent four years at it thus far. Broadcom shuttered the Vulcan Arm server chip project and sold it off to Cavium, which has revamped it as one of two distinct ThunderX2 chips. Calxeda, the original Arm server upstart, went bust trying to make the jump from 32 bits to 64 bits in servers, AMD has gone cold on its “K12” Arm chip, and Applied Micro was sold twice and is trying to re-emerge with the “Skylark” X-Gene 3 chip under a new company called Ampere.