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Comment on Facebook is the first to jump into ARM serversparent

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I highly doubt it. Having multiple hardware architectures in a datacenter is very costly. One gets better prices buying more items from the same supplier. It's a lot easier to maintain replacement parts/units for 1 architecture. Developing, testing, fire fixing bugs on multiple architectures is slower.

Google would argue with you.

They roll a heterogenous server setup intentionally to minimize impact from hardware faults, bugs, etc. You build your software at a high level where the hardware under is abstracted away.

Google's experience is only directly transferrable if you too are a search engine.

They do a lot more than search, and as far as I know App Engine runs on the same distributed system.

OK, but is your workload like App Engine either? I can tell you right now that mine isn't; we'd grind to a halt if we tried to pass and share as much state as we do on it.

Depends how good of a deal they can offer you. Saving 20% on a fleet of x86 servers is great but over the long term the supplier isn't going to be paying your electricity bills.

Right, but say FB can move 100% to ARM. Unless there are big differences in power consumption per x64/ARM unit in Web, Cashe and DB servers.

but when you have thousands of machines of each type, perhaps those economies of scale level out a bit

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