On my workload, using Intel as a baseline. AMD under performs relative to standard benchmarks. ARM over performs relative to standard benchmarks. I have seen good performance from Ampere, particularly for the price.
However, ARM architecture complicates my workflow significantly. I've found that they are not worth using it right now due to compatibility issues, easier to just stick with x86 for most things. Dealing with required missing packages just kills the value.
My system isn't generally compute limited anyway. IOPS and egress dominate rather than MIPS.
Introducing new distros to solve the problem is moving in the wrong direction. It's so much easier to deal with one distro in the cloud. Just more reasons not to go multi uArch.
ARM doesn't support the x86 docker eco system. That's a significant strike but not totally unworkable for me.
My primary database isn't prepackaged with the ARM packages nor does the originating org build one. I could build it myself, which I have done plenty over the years. I did try it, but the dependencies aren't up to date on ARM. So now I'm building dependencies and the software package. Building software from scratch can be a rabbit hole that eats untold amount of time. After a one-day effort I gave up and abandoned it. I'll revisit again if Hetzner brings Ampere to the US and I can verify the instances have much higher IOPS ceilings.
Enter another distro and I have to rebuild all of my provisioning and management scripts for all my services with all the testing entailed in the new dependency chains. I'd rather try to build my db from source again, frankly.
I'm curious what distro you're using where there are missing packages. I've never run across missing distro packages on arm64 Debian (which I regularly use at work).
Ubuntu server itself is pretty arm friendly. But there's a LOT of software that doesn't come with the distro's packaging that one might want to run in the cloud. Docker images and vendor hosted package repos. Everyone does this for x86. Very few do it for ARM. And if you want to try to build-from-source, the dependencies of a lot of pieces are often very out of date on ARM.
There is a kind of after market ARM community that occasionally builds these items. But they are generally pretty out of date.
I don't have an issue with the base distro and what it tries to do, but there are so many random pot holes and road blocks that just don't show up for x86.
I have ARM servers running in production now. But I have workloads that aren't reasonable portable to the uArch and I don't force them there.
I don't think I've ever run into an issue where arm64 packages are older than amd64 packages. Sometimes Debian Stable package versions are old, in which case I use backports, use the company's internal packages (which are often compiled for arm64), or compile it myself. It's no more of an issue on arm64 than on amd64.
On my workload, using Intel as a baseline. AMD under performs relative to standard benchmarks. ARM over performs relative to standard benchmarks. I have seen good performance from Ampere, particularly for the price.
However, ARM architecture complicates my workflow significantly. I've found that they are not worth using it right now due to compatibility issues, easier to just stick with x86 for most things. Dealing with required missing packages just kills the value.
My system isn't generally compute limited anyway. IOPS and egress dominate rather than MIPS.