Define "typical buyer". 10-15% instant energy savings would be one heck of a reason for FB/Google/Amazon/Microsoft to veer towards ARM for their clouds, especially if the vendor can plausibly show that they have more potential there.
These are servers, not hypedisruptionmarkets. Not once where there 400 % efficiency increases in a single generation of anything.
> 10-15% instant energy savings would be one heck of a reason for FB/Google/Amazon/Microsoft to veer towards ARM for their clouds
I'm not sure the upfront effort/cost would be worth it for that savings alone, especially when Intel will just come along and say they'll have that savings in an x86 chip in 9 months without any software dev required.
What this could do for the big DC companies though, is provide them a lever to keep Intel on that path. That lever alone might be worth all the dev effort required to support 2 architectures in a DC for some customers - and even if it's not worth it empirically, it may make them feel like it is.
These are servers, not hypedisruptionmarkets. Not once where there 400 % efficiency increases in a single generation of anything.