Yeah, this isn’t useful for many things, but as others have mentioned there are situations where it is. My original use case, the thing which prompted me to build this (other than just the fun of seeing if I could do it!) was to replace a whole load of low complexity VMs. I’m a freelance programmer and I do a bunch of hosting for both myself and some clients out of my home office. I’ve got a small rack setup in my attic with UPS, and have redundant fibre connections. It’s obvs nowhere near datacentre quality but it works well for my purposes.

I’d previously been using VMs running on some second hand enterprise x64 kit that I bought. Whilst this works great, the electricity bill is rather higher than I’d like! When I analysed what all the VMs are doing I realised that it’d be perfectly possible to do this on a Pi. In the dim and distant past I was a network infrastructure guy, so I started looking into “proper” server Pi solutions and before I knew it I was down this rabbit hole!

It works really well for low power server applications. It’s not in the same league as the big iron ARM mega-core servers (or indeed Xeon servers) for performance, but then it’s nowhere near that league for price either. I haven’t figured out an exact price if I was to sell it commercially, but it’d likely be in the $800 US price range without CMs. If you were to max that with 4GB PIs that’d end up around $1500, which’d give you 40 cores of pretty decent performance and 80GB of RAM. The Gigabyte and Altera servers I’ve seen are awesome and way more powerful than this but are several times more expensive.