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?

Pi is relatively underpowered (quite underpowered, even), has proprietary boot system, and similarly isn't exactly good with things you might want in professional server (there are some boards using compute modules that provide it as add on, but it's generally not a given). Also, I/O starved.

Mac is similarly an issue of proprietary system with no BMC support. Running one in a rack is always going to be at least partially half-baked solution. Additionally, you're heavily limited in OS support (for all that I love what Asahi has done, it does not mean you can install let's say RHEL on it, even in virtual machine - because M-series chips do not support 64kB page size which became the standard on ARM64 installs in the cloud, for example RHEL defaults to it and it was quite a pain to deal with in a company using Macbooks).

So you end up "shopping" for something that actually matches server hardware and it gets expensive and sometimes non-trivial, because ARM server market was (probably still is) not quite friendly to casually buying a rackmount server with ARM CPUs for affordable prices. Hyperscalers have completely different setups where they can easily tank the complexity costs because they can bother with customized hardware all the way to custom ASICs that provide management, I/O, and hypervisor boot and control path (like AWS Nitro).

One option is to find a VAR that actually sells ARM servers and not just appliances that happen to use ARM inside, but that's honestly a level of complexity (and pricing) above what many smaller companies want.

So if you're on a budget it's either cloud(-ish) solutions or maybe one your engineers can be spared to spend considerable amount of time to build a server from parts that will resemble something production quality.

PI is not that much unpowered by the dollar, is it?

I think Google demonstrated 20 years ago that server-grade hardware is no match for fault tolerance in software. Plenty of build farms use PIs, running standard flawless arm64 Linux distros.