Many people are confused by classifying where aarch64-future will go .. while some think Tier1 is dependent on thunderX, others think it depends on supported (consumers-) - boards. Thinking, discussing & arguing is a complicated thing while the truth looks much better than we all think : IT´s all there we just have to use it So Cloud-based aarch64- services plug the gap between expensive, rare metal servers and cheap consumer boards: Example: You are working on a project with others, member 1 owns a Rock64 with fbsd12 installed, member 2 has access to a thunderX-Server with current-head installed and member 3 even doesn't have any access to relevant aarch64-based hardware... oh, that's really unfortunate, we cannot continue working on the project, so let's argue in mailing lists which is the best way to goto Tier1 ... O.K.- ---- STOP HERE : all nonsense, we don't need to stop working, it's the opposite: we will even work 100 times faster from now on ------ whatever argument may be heard as the best in mailing lists or wherever : IT IS PROBABLY WRONG because all that is no problem in the real world of today : Everything we need exists on aarch64 , from slow to fast, from expensive to cheap, from perfect to crap.... so reorder to go back to our project: all three project-members can hook up VERY EASILY and immediately FreeBSD_aarch64-instances on e.g. AWS . And some will be surprised. **%%FreeBSD%% supports AWS EC2-instances very well** , just choose regions and checkout, what %%FreeBSD%%-versions are available as ready- to boot- AMI (Amazon Machine Image)... and you know what ? it's incredibly fast compared to any available consumer-board.... you will then choose your needed storage which applies to your AMI, hosted on EC2 on your AWS-account .. and of course you choose RAM/CPU-power ..... We wanted 3 things in the project: 1. the exact same %%FreeBSD%%-Version(s) because we were working on a version-related issue 2.: We wanted to compile not only 1 instance of our port, instead we wanted 2 or 3 .. 3.: We wanted SPEED and save time... to be honest: I started using it in a project to keep it cheap with 1 CPU and 2 Gigs of RAM, 10 Gig storage... but that was absolutely not what I wanted in the project... So I very happily ended up in using the 16-core , 32 GIG RAM-instance and attached 50 GB storage... if you have started with the default 10 Gig and fail in storage - usage( what I did:-) : extend your S3-storage and do the : service growfs onestart And afaik there are even bareMetal-instances available... While aarch64-EC2-instances on AWS are not cost-free, you can get it from very-low-cost and slow instances to real fast . https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/new-ec2-instances-a1-powered-by-arm-based-aws-graviton-processors/ If you only want to use AWS temporarily(that's what it's made for) , don't forget to remove your running instances/storage/ from your account. So this article isn't thought as an AWS-tutorial(not needed because wisywig there eis self-explained), nor is it thought as advertising for a company which doesn't need advertising :-) It is thought to remind you : You can speed up development by using Cloud-Services occasionally. Then you can download your (AWS-) compiled project to your local slow snail- consumer - board and continue there ... let's say you spent 3$ for a hammer-fast compilation but have saved 15 hours (working-) time : Let's agree: not the worst deal you have made ;-)