Big companies have plenty of access. I work for Red Hat and have one right next to my desk. I also know SUSE and MSFT have the hardware, and I'm sure many more.

I've been working on fixing bugs in the ARMv8 backend in the OCaml compiler - it's now stable, and performs very well (I can't go into exact performance details for contract reasons).

http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=6489

http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=6284

http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=6283

(and more ...)

> hard to benchmark on ARMv8 since non-Apple hardware is expensive.

If Android will do - Cortex-A53 smartphones like the Huawei Ascend Y550 cost 120€ nowdays in Europe (about 4x the price of a Raspberry Pi).

Also Nexus 9, for quite a bit more money. The problem with these phones and tablets is they are quite unlike server hardware:

- Far too little memory (2GB vs 16/32GB+)

- Slow flash vs SATA disks

- The "zoo" of u-boot/proprietary kernel crap, instead of UEFI, ACPI and standard upstream kernels

- Nonsense like locked bootloaders (Nexus 9 disables HYP mode in the bootloader!!!)