Bought myself an Ampere Altra system

I've always wondered why there isn't a bigger market / offering for dedicated servers with Ampere at their heart (apart from Hetzner)

If anyone knows of any, let me know!

A lot of software is built and optimized for x86 and EPYC processors are really good so it is hard to get into arm, don’t think that many companies use it.

> A lot of software is built and optimized for x86 and EPYC processors are really good so it is hard to get into arm, don’t think that many companies use it.

That is just not true.

Nowadays, most OSS software and most server side software will run without any hinch on armv8.

A tremendous amount of work has been done to speed up common software on armv8, partially due to popularity of mobile as a platform but also and to the emergence of ARM servers (Graviton / Neoverses) in the major Cloud providers infrastructure.

However, it's hard to get into ARM other than using cloud offerings.

Because those cloud offerings have handled for you the problematic case of ARM generally operating as "closed platform" even when everything is open source.

On a PC server, usually you only hit any issues if you want to play with something more exotic on either software or hardware. Bog-standard linux setup is trivial to integrate.

On ARM, even though finally there's UEFI available, I recall that even few years ago there were issues with things like interrupt controller support - and that kind of reputation persists and definitely makes it harder to percolate on-prem ARM.

It also does not help that you need to go for pretty pricy systems to avoid vendor lock-in at firmware compatibility level - or had to, until quite recently.

Why is it hard to get a mac or a pi?