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Linus Torvalds Comments on ARM: Did he lose touch with reality? (www.realworldtech.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

X86 and AMD64 based stuff is fairly standard in terms of a motherboard with a BIOS/UEFI and peripheral busses. ARM has for a long time been kind of a mess in this regard, and there are several varieties of ARM architecture that don't play nicely with code compiled for others.

Don't get me wrong. ARM can be great for certain types of workloads. It's typically more efficient at lower power than X86, and better at various types of math. That's why we DO see it available on ARM for certain stuff like Lambda functions, but you probably won't be running full VM environments on it.

Last: notice how it's been hard to find certain varieties of Pi and various other stuff running ARM? There's shortages all over the place but I'm general Intel and AMD have been able to apply demand for their CPU's.

Yes, devs aren't tied to hardware, but there are efficiencies of scale to consider

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s why we DO see it available on ARM for certain stuff like Lambda functions, but you probably won’t be running full VM environments on it.

We do see Amazon, Oracle and other providers offering full ARM based VMs, they work fine for the price... Even Facebook have been investing in ARM for their datacenters.

, but there are efficiencies of scale to consider

Yes there are, ARM will always be cheaper than Intel and is reaching competitive / comparable levels of performance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes there are, ARM will always be cheaper than Intel and is reaching competitive / comparable levels of performance.

Compute time is significantly cheaper than dev time. 76% of the internet web is powered by PHP and entire services are developed in JS. The average cost of a software developer in the US is 140k, while you can rent a server with 24 cores, 64 GiB of RAM and 4 TiB SSD that can run plenty of badly optimized Node.js docker containers for 90 bucks a month.