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Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

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Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#61
post #33

It's of course impossible not to respect Linus' opinion and first hand experience in this space, but doesn't this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely smartphones . That's an entire enormous segment of the industry and it's nearly 100% (or entirely 100%?) literally develop-on-x86-deploy-on-ARM. Smartphones also fit > "This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is…

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Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#62
This is why if Apple ever did a legitimate server offering with virtualization they would kill it. How many devs, develop on Mac and deploy to linux? And also now use VMs for containers. Imagine if MacOS supported containers natively. They leave so much money on the table.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#63
post #25

He is right. I'm still waiting for that ARM-based laptop with awesome battery life, which can run a proper OS with good speed and hence is not just a toy. Apple switching to ARM won't make much difference since I gather it will only run OSX, which will probably be pretty much iOS at that time. Yes, you will probably be able to run Linux on that thing, but almost nobody will actually do it because it makes much more s…

Apple's A12X CPU is competitive with the Intel CPUs they're currently using in their laptops:

https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/01/ipad-pro-a12x-benchmarks-...

You'll probably be able to run Windows 10 on a future Apple ARM-based laptop, though I imagine the problem will be getting Windows drivers for the GPU.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#64
For this to happen we would have to use our phones as workstations - just connect monitor and input devices. That's current mission of Rob Landley with his Toybox project ¹. Years ahead of us, but probably will happen. Makes projects like Librem 5, Pinephone and Pinebook crucial in the long run.

¹ http://landley.net/toybox/about.html - see the Why section

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#65

Well all the kids are learning programming with ARM-based RPis so...

Are they really? RPi is cool and all, but I doubt the market share of ARM development is that big. As I was kid I got interested in programming because I wanted to develop games, and I would guess that still most yungsters want. For that RPi is shitty choice.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#66
post #43

> Some people think that "the cloud" means that the instruction set doesn't matter. 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). This is why having a compilation target that works the same way everywhe…

> This is why having a compilation target that works the same way everywhere would be so valuable. We're some ways away from this, but I think WebAssembly offers hope here.

Why does WebAssembly offer more hope than the JVM, or interpreted languages that we already have? It will still have to interop with native libraries to get work done.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#68

Interesting theory. I wonder then what will happen when Macbooks start shipping with >A12 CPUs [1], will we see more ARM based servers then? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A12X

I wonder whether Apple’s arm PCs will go more the way of chrome books and ms surface laptops. Although since people that buy these are looking for significant value, it’s hard to think Apple will be successful.

And if Apple switches pro line to arm, they’ll probably lose all non iOS/macOS developers. So, good luck to them then there.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#69
post #33

It's of course impossible not to respect Linus' opinion and first hand experience in this space, but doesn't this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely smartphones . That's an entire enormous segment of the industry and it's nearly 100% (or entirely 100%?) literally develop-on-x86-deploy-on-ARM. Smartphones also fit > "This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is…

Smartphones are a good argument for both views IMHO. Native development (as in native machine code executables) on Android is still a terrible experience even though they had a decade to fix it. It's much better on Apple platforms, maybe because they actually cared about developer-experience and native code is a "first class citizen" there.

It goes beyond the different instruction set of course and most of the time this is indeed mostly irrelevant (unless you've arrived at processor-specific optimizations), but the "develop on the same platform you are running on" still has the least painful workflow IMHO.

I wouldn't mind an ARM-based Mac though ;)

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#70

Lest we forget, ARM has problems with instruction ordering not happening the way programmers might assume in certain cases. https://preshing.com/20121019/this-is-why-they-call-it-a-wea... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4673458

ARM doesn't ”have a problem” with the ordering. Rather, those CPUs take advantage of the re-ordering allowed by the specified ordering constraints. The behaviour is entirely expected. The default option for those c++ atomic operations is the strongest constraint (memory_order_seq_cst) - a programmer who specifies a more relaxed constraint better have a good reason for it.
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