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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: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Monday February 25 2019, @12:30PM (3 children)
Of course, part of the appeal of that was not so much that your "home" system had the same processor as a "proper server" but that it ran the same operating system and proprietary software, the filing system worked the same way etc. Before x86 took over, the "proper" server option was likely a mini/mainframe running a proprietary Unix variant, VMS or some other weird OS with a 5-digit-per-year license fee - probably with DBMS and other server software that - if not proprietary - didn't really work on a DOS/Windows PC.
If only there were some server-class operating system that ran on everything from white-box x86 PCs, through embedded PPC-based NAS boxes and ARM servers to exotic supercomputer hardware with trendy RISC architectures... Maybe inspired by a solid, scalable OS with a tradition of cross-platform source-level compatibility - like Unix, but without all the copyright/licensing uncertainty...? What if it was open source under a clever license so that you could just grab and run a free beer version on your local computer but software houses could also produce commercial versions with support for mission-critical use? What if it became not only a widely used commercial server platform, but the kernel ended up in the most widely used personal OS [android.com]? What if that led to wide-spread adoption of open-source server software (DBMS, webserver, scripting etc,) and open protocols?
What if that was accompanied by an increase in computing power that meant the vast majority of application development could be done in high-level languages, even interpreted or JIT-compiled "scripting" languages, or in the form of browser-based 'web apps', so that CPU architecture was almost irrelevant vs. the OS and standard libraries?
If that had happened, we might find ourselves in a very different world to the DOS/Windows monoculture of the 90s when x86 took over the server world. I'm sure the big monopoly players would still be around and causing trouble, but they'd have to adapt. Of course, I'm not suggesting that Microsoft would have to go as far as incorporating the new OS into Windows [microsoft.com] or (ha!) port SQL Server to it [microsoft.com], because that would be ridiculous and hell would freeze over [livescience.com] first :-)
If only. This Linus Torvalds sounds like a really smart guy, so maybe he could try and get an OS like that off the ground. He could call in "LinOS" or "Torvix" or something...
(Score: 5, Funny) by choose another one on Monday February 25 2019, @12:44PM (2 children)
> If only. This Linus Torvalds sounds like a really smart guy, so maybe he could try and get an OS like that off the ground. He could call in "LinOS" or "Torvix" or something...
But why bother when HURD will do all this and more and will be out and ready for production use in only a few months?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @01:34PM
I hurd the same rumor.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @05:37PM
Current processors are not powerful enough to run operating systems based on mutually recursive acronyms. They are guaranteed to stall, man.