I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server platform.
If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.
I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible".
Well, yes, but I was hoping someone would put it more eloquently, so thanks :)
I can't see what the target market is. The I/O is going to be terrible for hosting files. And 32-bit ARM is at a disadvantage for anything more computationally intensive (as you pointed out).
Maybe there's a group of users out there who have been thinking for years: "If only I could have my old smartphone colocated in a data center"...?
I will try to test if those "servers" would be good for task processing. Example: let's say I have a ton of websites to crawl (high IO, not much CPU, ideally parallel). I could use a couple of these to cheaply do the job.
I am guessing that any job that is not CPU or memory hungry would fit the bill. Like crawling, sending a massive amount of emails, simple text processing, maybe even as a RabbitMQ server.
I have an Odroid XU [1] which is similar to this. For 32 bit ARM it's actually not too slow, but I/O is terrible with an SD-card. There is an optional eMMC card which improves the situation, but IIRC there's no option to use an SSD. Note the server advertised here isn't quite the same so YMMV.
I could think of an application in which there would be minimal disk interaction and just lots of network action and in-memory processing so hypothetically it all depends on how the CPU handles parallelization through its cores.
If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.