During break between talks I spoke with Rob Taylor and Andreia Gaita about lack of ARM powered servers. And then cute hack appeared in my head…
Rockchip released RK3268 (if I got numbers correctly) which uses four Cortex-A12 cores. There are HDMI dongles with it and 2 GB of ram.
So the idea is: we take 1U server case, glue as many dongles as we can and connect them with USB cables for power and network. Then put some OpenStack or other software to maintain a cloud and it may even work.
The problems Rob noted would be heat and lack of bandwidth. But it would be cute embedded nonsense hack.