SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday February 25 2019, @03:30PM (2 children)
I would dearly love to see a strong ARM based server alternative for data centers.
As I've said here recently: x86 needs to DIE DIE DIE.
It's time for a new simple clean efficient approach. Not chained to forty years of legacy architecture -- that was designed to be source code compatible with the 8080 assembler through the use of segment registers.
I hate to disagree with Linus, but most software above the bootloader, kernel, basic libraries and system service layers are in high level languages mostly insulated from the nuts and bolts of the hardware.
Being an expert at something doesn't make one an expert at everything.
For over 15 years I have dreamed of software developers being independent of OS and processor architecture. That dream is already substantially more realized today than ever before.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:17AM (1 child)
There are some 30-40 core ARM chips out there, and I recall a company selling decent-looking (and reasonably priced for that type of equipment) workstations and servers with them. I'll see if I can find it again.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:15PM
I've heard of some of that. I know it is possible. But my dream is for it to become mainstream. And seriously upset Intel's monopoly.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.