When I saw the picture at the top I thought someone besides me was using ThunderX as a PC. The single-thread performance is nothing to write home about, but if you can find something to engage all 48 cores (like pbzip2) then its bananas.
I don't know why they say Cavium is "not interested" in making a PC. It's not their main market, but they'll sell you chips and eval boards. You need a few daughter cards for SATA and PCIe so you can plug in a graphics card. What's really needed is someone to integrate that design, putting the normal IO on board.
It runs 98% of Ubuntu packages, thanks in part to Linaro's own hard work. So they should know, it's a perfectly viable project.
Ansolutely. Ill go further to say they should buy Cavium and an S-ASIC vendor (eASIC or Triad) to have a pile of SoC tech that can be applied in most applications plus an option for rapid development of non-performance-critical chips. They already have fabs for sensitive stuff, too, but I dont know how they perform. Maybe buy one graphics vendor next. And they're covered in desktop, servers, laptops, and many purpose-built appliances. The stuff might also be scaled down or sold low margin for embedded where microcontrollers might have been used.
Russia has the money. There's a number of vendors with the tech. They should just buy their way into the high end.
Able to point to a sales channel where one might be picked up? The last time I reached out to Cavium directly, they made it seem they weren't interested in a sale that wouldn't lead to volume later.
I'd talk to Gigabyte. They build systems to spec. If you want to go to Cavium directly then you're right that you have to convince them you have a solid business plan to move some thousands of units a month, in which case they will bend over backwards to help you do so.
I don't know why they say Cavium is "not interested" in making a PC. It's not their main market, but they'll sell you chips and eval boards. You need a few daughter cards for SATA and PCIe so you can plug in a graphics card. What's really needed is someone to integrate that design, putting the normal IO on board.
It runs 98% of Ubuntu packages, thanks in part to Linaro's own hard work. So they should know, it's a perfectly viable project.