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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 25 2019, @10:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-word-according-to-linus dept.

https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=183440&curpostid=183486

Guys, do you really not understand why x86 took over the server market?

It wasn't just all price. It was literally this "develop at home" issue. Thousands of small companies ended up having random small internal workloads where it was easy to just get a random whitebox PC and run some silly small thing on it yourself. Then as the workload expanded, it became a "real server". And then once that thing expanded, suddenly it made a whole lot of sense to let somebody else manage the hardware and hosting, and the cloud took over.

Do you really not understand? This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is literally what happened, and what killed all the RISC vendors, and made x86 be the undisputed king of the hill of servers, to the point where everybody else is just a rounding error. Something that sounded entirely fictional a couple of decades ago.

Without a development platform, ARM in the server space is never going to make it. Trying to sell a 64-bit "hyperscaling" model is idiotic, when you don't have customers and you don't have workloads because you never sold the small cheap box that got the whole market started in the first place.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

Channeling the late Steve Jobs, Linux kernel king Linus Torvalds this week dismissed cross-platform efforts to support his contention that Arm-compatible processors will never dominate the server market.

Responding to interest in Arm's announcement of its data center-oriented Neoverse N1 and E1 CPU cores on Wednesday, and a jibe about his affinity for native x86 development, Torvalds abandoned his commitment to civil discourse and did his best to dampen enthusiasm for a world of heterogeneous hardware harmony.

"Some people think that 'the cloud' means that the instruction set doesn't matter," Torvalds said in a forum post. "Develop at home, deploy in the cloud. That's bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test 'at home' (and by 'at home' I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment)."

For Torvalds, this supposedly unavoidable preference for hardware architecture homogeneity means technical types will gladly pay more for x86 cloud hosting, if only for the assurance that software tested in a local environment performs the same way in the data center.

Jobs during his time as Apple's CEO took a similar stance toward native application development, going so far as to ban Adobe's Flash technology on devices running iOS in 2010. For Jobs, cross-platform code represented a competitive threat, bugs, and settling for lowest-common denominator apps.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Walzmyn on Monday February 25 2019, @11:02AM (1 child)

    by Walzmyn (987) on Monday February 25 2019, @11:02AM (#806268)

    going so far as to ban Adobe's Flash technology on devices running iOS in 2010

    He says that like it was a bad thing.

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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @03:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @03:21PM (#806320)

    Not only that, but for a very long time, Java was a cross-platform product that was guaranteed to run poorly and act like an unstoppable virus no matter how good of a computer you had or new or old of an OS you had. It simply sucked no matter how much money you had. Truly it was a great equalizier of what we used to call the internet back then.

    I remember when being on dial-up, if the browser flashed the message "java starting up..." or something like that, it was time to quickly hit the back button or go somewhere else, anywhere else--worst case scenario, yank the phone cord out and let the java fail, then close the page and dial back into the ISP to recover. Sometimes that didn't even work and a reboot was required to truly be free of the Javian menace.

    It's way better now--Intel and AMD recongized the demand and released processors with enough cores that a browser could run at 100% across many cores for a myriad of unnecessary web processes while providing enough performance left to auto-play advertisements while you wait. Google simply removed the OS from the equation and just shows ads on their devices, preventing the need for fancy desktop cpus in their phones.