I'm using Ampere powered servers on Oracle cloud and boy, they're snappy, even with the virtualization layer on top.

Amazon has its own ARM CPUs on AWS, and you can get them on demand, too.

Xeons and EPYCs are great for "big loads", however some supercomputer centers also started to install "experimental" ARM partitions.

The future is bright not because Intel is floundering, but there'll be at least three big CPU producers (ARM, AMD and Intel).

Also, don't have prejudices about "brands". most motherboard brands can design server-class hardware if they wish. They're just making different trade-offs because of the market they're in.

I used servers which randomly fried parts of their motherboard when see some "real" load. Coming one morning and having no connectivity because a top of the line 2 port gigabit onboard Ethernet fried itself on a top of the line, flagship server is funny in its own way.

Since roughly the first year of covid the supply generally has been quite bad. Yes, I can get _some_ xeon or epyc from HPE quickly, but if I care about specific specs it's also a several month long wait. For midsized servers (up to about 100 total threads) AMD still doesn't really have competition if you look at price, performance and power - I'm currently waiting for such a machine, the intel option would've been 30% more expensive at worse specs.

ARM server CPUs are great, I'd move all of our stuff to them once more competition happens. Give it a few more years.

HPE has an Ampere server line that is quite good, especially considering TCO, density, and the IO it can pack. But yeah you'll have to fork some cash.

You can get them on Oracle cloud servers for whatever you choose to do, last i looked and used them.