There is no way a gf28nm is going to compete with a 22/14nm Intel solution for specint perf/eff. Quelle surprice. And there is no way this is a 100usd product. Its like selling Atom for the mobile market.
Which is working, surprisingly.
Besides the core integer speed difference between a15 and a57 is not that big according to arm own assessment, but memory speed takes a bigger hike.
Also, SPECInt is very likely going to give better results, relative to applications, on RISC CPUs, anyway, being mostly made up of loops that fit in various levels of caches. IoW, even AMD's own comparison against their Jaguar products should be taken with some salt.
Where is extreme low cost, seamicro fabric and high memory perf. an advantage?
Depends. I didn't see any costs for the CPUs, or supported servers (IE, HP), or bare-bones servers (IE, Supermicro). If they can get good SATA performance from all ports at once, while pushing enough data over the network to make 10GbE worth more than just not dropping down the speed at a switch, and the cost is low for having the 10GbE NICs, it could be quite compelling. Lots of ifs; not enough practical info.
What if tdp was say 9w and freq 1ghz?
Meh. The losses from fans, power supplies, drives, etc. make the SoC's power a secondary issue. it matters, but there's a point where reducing it isn't going to be worth the performance loss incurs from running at lower speeds. It's a balancing act, which includes up front costs, as well. You can bet AMD will offer slower models, though.
What is the FP perf of A57, if strong, is there any customers for that?
For what these are going to used for, nobody cares. Hardware FP support, to get low latencies for FP operations, may matter to some customers, but throughput of FP will not matter one bit to anyone even slightly interested. Xeon E5s, and even Teslas, aren't very expensive, if you have a business need for their FLOPS, and will generally be cheaper in the long run than many weaker processors.
These are targeted very much towards RAM caching, custom NAS/SAN infrastructures, shared web/DB hosting, network appliance makers, and so on. 99.999% int, and even then, very little throughput tends to be needed. Plenty of cores, for more active threads, and efficient interrupt handling, could matter, as could RAM capacity, but FP needs basically end at not being emulated in software, and having enough of the ISA's FP instructions supported to be able to use major distro X's binaries.
Lower SPECint performance than currently-shipping Avoton (106 v.s. 80), higher TDP, and using a new ISA that doesn't have the maturity of x86 in this market?
LOL!!! AMD is really done for.
Your username is showing. ARM is sufficiently mature for what these are targeted for. The software industry as a whole has made sure that this transition won't go down like IA32->x86-64 did. There's bound to be teething issues, but you can bet everything will be solid by the time 2015 rolls around, once real chips have been able to be tested with. Unlike with x86-64, most important software is already waiting on hardware, and devs and admins just need the hardware to test with to iron out the last kinks.
AMD may or may not be done for, but low-power server processors with support for many drives and gobs of RAM will make inroads, and there are companies hungrier than Intel, of which AMD is one. That, or Intel will to drop their ASPs and reduce their R&D, as part of trying to push others out, putting them on a path to not be the top-tier chip maker in the world, anymore, but just another Samsung, keeping up with the Joneses and abusing market positions. I have a feeling competition nipping at their heels is going to be better for us and them compared to that hypothetical scenario, so I'd rather it not go down like that. A short-term loss leader will not work. If they tried, as soon as they stopped losing money, a company that made ARM server SoCs for embedded use only would go ahead and remarket what they had, and start this all back up again.
Not going whole hog x86, however, is a bit worrisome. More because AMD has unique x86 designs to offer and improve upon, rather than any ARM software issues.