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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
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.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday February 25 2019, @12:03PM (1 child)
He's not saying ARM is dead, he's specifically saying that x86/x64 has now succesfully pwned the server market; game over. He's not ruling out that ARM might (and quite possibly will) achieve similar dominance on the embedded CPU market (including phones, telemetry devices, printers, etc.). I think he's probably right, although I do wish it were otherwise. For the right workload, I can easily imagine a Beowulf cluster of ARM boards having the lowest TCO, actually procuring and building it however is something else entirely.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday February 25 2019, @11:23PM
I think your comment fell through a time warp from sometime around 2000. It was right at the time. ARM has achieved dominance in the phone market, at least, and probably embedded too (given that the SSD in your PC probably contains an ARM).
Now we have a huge "cloud" industry primarily running webservers, DMBSs and scripting languages which are all already up and running on ARM Linux and pretty much processor-agnostic as far as application developers and day-to-day operations are concerned. Power consumption is a big thing and if an ARM system can deliver equivalent performance to Intel at lower power consumption, customers will listen. Intel has hit the wall on die shrink and is trying to pack the cores in instead - and that's where ARM can get them.