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Linus Torvalds Comments on ARM: Did he lose touch with reality? (www.realworldtech.com)
submitted 3 years ago* by to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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tr:dr; he says "x86 took over the server market" because it was the same architecture developers in companies had on their machines thus it made it very easy to develop applications on their machines to then ship to the servers.

Now this, among others he made, are very good points on how and why it is hard for ARM to get mainstream on the datacenter, however I also feel like he kind lost touch with reality on this one...

He's comparing two very different situations, more specifically eras. Developers aren't so tied anymore like they used to be to the underlaying hardware. The software development market evolved from C to very high language languages such as Javascript/Typescript and the majority of stuff developed is done or will be done in those languages thus the CPU architecture becomes irrelevant.

Obviously very big companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon are more than happy to pay the little "tax" to ensure Javascript runs fine on ARM than to pay the big bucks they pay for x86..

What are your thoughts?

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[–] 40 points 3 years ago (12 children)

As someone dealing with enterprise software for living, what he's saying absolutely makes sense, and I deal mostly in web applications (where I never really have to worry about the low level stuff).

Just because the top layer seems to be the same, doesn't mean the underlying ones are. There's a reason why perfect bug compatibility is a thing (or maybe, was, in RHEL ecosystem?).

Things that looks like slam dunks in theories are never such in practice. Weird bugs pop up from time to time; and believe me, they will!

It might be rare, you may only see it once or twice in a project; but when it happens, you're gonna want to be ready, or people will question your ability to do your job.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    The cross-compiling point makes sense but, since this is a 4.5 year old message, the state of ARM in the cloud has changed. Now developers do actually have ARM-based machines because of Apple. AWS has Graviton2 instances now and they are a lot cheaper than similarly specced x86_64 instances. ARM is a viable consideration that can be made.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    While its true that having ARM ecosystem is more feasible now, there's not many companies that's willing to equip their whole team with very specific model of laptop, with almost no servicable parts for no perceivable benefit. No, Pinebooks as well as Raspberry Pi laptops and cyberdecks are not feasible for industry.

    Most companies are not looking for gimmicks for work, even when they make some for living; so no, looking cool is not a benefit that defeats all that cost.

    Meanwhile, most people in the industry, such as myself, and my current bosses & colleagues, and my previous bosses & colleagues, and probably all my future bosses & colleagues are fine running x86 for production servers. It got everything we'd need, including upgradable RAM and decades worth of collective experience, which I cannot say ARM has.

    At the same time, I have some hope for RISC-V. It won't take over the industry anytime soon, but it's been showing some promise for long term.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Fair. For what it's worth though, macbooks have been the default laptop at every startup I've worked at over the last ~8 years.. The first M1 mbp was released in 2020 and most of those companies I was at had a policy of replacing machines after 2-3ish years too. it's getting to the point where entire companies can be/are running on arm.

    Might be more specific to particular industries or company maturity level but this has been my personal experience.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago (4 children)

    No, Pinebooks as well as Raspberry Pi laptops and cyberdecks are not feasible for industry.

    You know that's all just a software thing. If Microsoft decided to open Windows for ARM then it would no longer apply.

    are fine running x86 for production servers. It got everything we’d need, including upgradable RAM and decades worth of collective experience, which I cannot say ARM has.

    Yes but people nowadays go mostly for the cloud. Cloud providers will make scale ARM and sell it cheaper and you won't be replacing RAM on those for sure... at some point your management will simply crush your budget you'll be forced on ARM.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (3 children)

    Okay, now you got me curious. Gimme examples of companies using ARM servers.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago*

    Not who you were responding to but, my company does this in AWS. To be fair, the entire platform is running in EKS so it's not much more difficult than updating the CI build pipelines to build multi-arch containers, adding additional nodepools, and scaling down the amd64 ones. This was tedious but not difficult to do. I keep a small set of amd64 nodes for off the shelf software that doesn't support arm.. I think the only thing left on those now is newrelic agents. Once we move off of them the x86_64 nodes can be killed entirely.

    This ended up saving us tens of thousands of dollars per month. The next step is to move the bulk of workloads to spot instances. I'll be preferring arm but if there is only capacity for x86_64, I'll have that option because of the multi-arch containers. This is going to save even more money and force developers to build applications more tolerant of node failure in the process.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 years ago

    If we exclude all cloud providers who sell ARM like Google, Amazon and Oracle. Facebook actively uses ARM at scale and I personally have seen medium size companies (~200-500 employees) using it simply because their backend run fine and it's cheaper.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Things that looks like slam dunks in theories are never such in practice. Weird bugs pop up from time to time; and believe me, they will!

    It might be rare, you may only see it once or twice in a project; but when it happens, you’re gonna want to be ready, or people will question your ability to do your job.

    Yes, however price is more important that all that. If your management knows it can save 20% on their cloud spending by running ARM they'll run ARM and have you deal with those rare bugs.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    "If" being the key word here. There are nuances to be considered. One DB might run really well on arm, the other not so much.

    I'm saying it as huge fan of the arm servers. They are amazing and often save a lot of money essentially for free. (practically only a few characters change in terraform) In AWS with the hosted services (Opensearch, and such) there's usually no good reason to pay extra for x86 hardware especially since most of the intricacies are handled by AWS.

    But there are workloads that just do not run on arm all that well and you would end up paying more for the HW to get to the performance levels you had with x86.

    And that's beside all those little pain points mentioned above that you're "left to deal with" which isn't cheap either. (but that doesn't show up on the AWS bill, so management is happy to report cost savings)

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    there’s usually no good reason to pay extra for x86 hardware especially since most of the intricacies are handled by AWS. (...) all those little pain points mentioned above that you’re “left to deal with” which isn’t cheap either. (but that doesn’t show up on the AWS bill, so management is happy to report cost savings)

    Exactly my point above when people start shouting about upgradability compatibility and whatnot.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    Yeah, I was saying "no reason" in the context of SAAS. Once the management falls on the end user, it's a different beast altogether.

    I think we're trying to say the same in a different way actually. 😅

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