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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 jmorris on Monday February 25 2019, @05:44PM (2 children)
Yeah, but even today Java is write once, debug everywhere. Which is why anyone sane packages the exact JVM used for development and testing with the application. Which means you deploy on the same hardware arch you develop and test on unless you are a fool. Of course the IT world is largely fools now so....
The bottleneck to ARM deployment is the video problem. Small ARM boards that are more than powerful enough to do development work on exist, but they are all either entirely headless or usable only as media players because there are no stable accelerated video drivers for Linux. Android you can get EGL drivers for, but not GL and even now Vulkan is still rare.
AMD is the one hot and bothered to push ARM into the server space so they need to realize the problem and that they are uniquely suited to fixing it. Dump Mali, bolt on a medium spec Radeon core to a midgrade ARM and release a developer targeted board. Aim for a Micro-ATX form factor, put a pair of DDR4 slots for RAM, a few PCIe slots for the odd peripherals the real world requires that aren't on USB interfaces and of course some USB3.1 ports for the stuff that is. Add a GigE and call it good. Better still, once you have PCIe just put a PCIe x16 slot in and list some specific Radeon boards (a low, med and high end at minimum) that ARM support has been upstreamed for. Then price to compete with an AMD x86 of similar performance. Yea, that would mean taking a loss for a year to seed the market, AMD might have trouble doing that part.
Then embark on a PR campaign to make having one the new hotness, like they did with the PR campaign for the RaspPi.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday February 25 2019, @05:54PM
Maybe for Swing, creating desktop UIs. It doesn't seem to be the case for web applications where the Java code is mostly a "function" that takes inputs and serves up web pages. Where you see cross-platform differences that lead to bugs is when you are using things that touch platform specifics, like a desktop GUI in Swing. Or maybe even JavaFX. I have had to make minor platform adjustments for Swing, and I have not used JavaFX so I can't speak to that. Most of my Java experience is now with web server applications, and I don't see debug everywhere.
In practice, what we deploy on is pretty close to what we develop, test and demo on. (Windows, x86, the biggest variation is which version of Java or Tomcat, but the app seems highly insensitive to that variation.)
I wish AMD luck with pushing ARM into the server space. Intel needs some serious competition. My dream would be for ARM and Linux to be cost effective enough to force managers to take notice.
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(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday February 27 2019, @11:56AM
I think the 'write once, debug everywhere is grossly overstated'. I work at a Java web shop and we have developers working on Macs, on Windows, and on Ubuntu Linux and our deployment platform is CentOS Linux and we never have a cross-platform problem. And twelve or so years ago it was "develop on Windows, deploy on Solaris" and everything was fine then too. Now if we were writing GUI applications, it might be different.