Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by scarface74 » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 1:50 PM UTC

blattimwind wrote: post #107

scarface74 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing stopping you from developing on x86 and SSHing to a remote ARM computer for final validation. Cross compilation has been a thing for decades.

Linus' point is literally that the pains associated with cross developing/compilation are what brought x86 to power and keeps it there.

On the level of Linux it might be hard, but thousands of iOS developers do it all of the time. On the application level if you are just doing C, my experience with writing cross platform C, if it works on one platform and breaks on the other, there is probably a bug in your software that is only surfacing on one platform usually around depending on undefined behavior or relying implementation defined behavior.

But my “experience” with native cross platform programming is two decades old - x86 and whatever the old DEC VAX and Stratus VOS platforms were running.

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

#112

Post by chongli » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 1:52 PM UTC

xoa wrote: 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…

When "mobile" and "PC" gets merged

I don't see this happening. PCs are tools for getting real work done. Mobiles are mostly communication and entertainment devices.

I like to fall back on this Steve Jobs quote, employing a car/truck metaphor for computers:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that's what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular … PCs are going to be like trucks. They're still going to be around, they're still going to have a lot of value, but they're going to be used by one out of X people.

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

#113

Post by petra » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 1:54 PM UTC

yaantc wrote: post #99

jacknews wrote: post #35

Except that doesn't quite explain why soo many developers use macbooks (OS/X), yet deploy on Linux. Personally I think ARM could be leapfrogged by RISC-V, though it will take longer than people predict.

> ARM could be leapfrogged by RISC-V For the low-end deeply embedded space, I could see RISC V becoming a significant player in the next 5 years. ARM is relatively expensive there (it's cheap compared to Intel for servers, but at the low end it's more the IBM of Microsoft of old), and there's less need for their ecosystem (most 3rd party software is open source). The Cortex M are less flexible then some competitors i…

I agree that at the low-end , at least in low-end ip-cores, RISC-V could do well.

But in microcontrollers ?

To be meaningful there, they will have to convince one of the big western guys to bet on them.

But why would any of them care , enough to hurt their future relationship with ARM ,a significant risk ?

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

#114

Post by AstralStorm » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 1:55 PM UTC

jerguismi wrote: post #65

mangecoeur wrote: post #24

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.

It is pretty big for smartphones and tablets. And embedded devices.

Games on smartphones are perfectly viable - RPi is not good enough but oDroid or Google Pixel is.

The only problem is developing on same machine as you use. For that, you need a full fledged, quite powerful ARM laptop. Hacked Chromebook for example. Otherwise, the emulator is way too slow.

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

#115

Post by alexandernst » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #88

alexandernst wrote: post #73

Vast majority of "cloud" user develop and deploy code written on languages that have "no idea" what architecture the CPU is running on. Eg, I code on Python/Django. Why would I care even a little bit about what set of instructions the CPU of my EC2 instance has? I don't. Because Python/Django will run exactly the same way on x86 and on ARM.

Now imagine some non x86 vendor adds a couple instructions that make Python code miraculously faster. Wouldn't you want that server?

Sure. But that's not my point. My point is that the entire argument that Linus has about users willing to test and deploy code on the same arch is flawed. I'd understand and agree with that argument if we we're talking about developing and deploying C (which is what Linus is used to), but that's just not how "the cloud" is used.

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

#116

Post by pdpi » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

The fact that my local CPU is a different ISA from the server is barely a consideration after I've already had to account for the fact that the database is local instead of remote, that I'm using PCIe-attached storage instead of a network-mounted volume, that my local workload is wildly different from the deployment environment's... Ultimately, cross-development is much more meaningful as a software problem than it is as a hardware problem — but, given the popularity of macOS as a development environment, it seems clear that we're happy developing on something unix-y and deploying to another brand of unix-y something-or-other.

Linus is then ignoring the single biggest factor in this equation: performance-per-watt. ARM offers better performance/watt numbers than anything Intel can provide right now. Recent offerings on the server space suggest ARM is managing to scale up without sacrificing too much on that front, and Intel doesn't seem to be keeping up.

If you're operating a data centre, power supply is the single hardest limit to your capacity to scale up. Putting up another building at a pre-existing site is cheaper and easier than finding a way to pipe more power into it, so it doesn't even matter that much that servers are individually less powerful.

Google is investing in ARM, Facebook is investing in ARM, and I can only imagine several other big players are looking into it too. I wouldn't write it off this easily.

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

#117

Post by pjc50 » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #112

xoa wrote: 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…

When "mobile" and "PC" gets merged I don't see this happening. PCs are tools for getting real work done. Mobiles are mostly communication and entertainment devices. I like to fall back on this Steve Jobs quote, employing a car/truck metaphor for computers: When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that's what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars go…

> Mobiles are mostly communication

Communication is also work, especially as you go up the management value chain. I think maybe people should refer to the thing that PCs do and mobiles don't as "typing".

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

#118

Post by dkarl » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #69

xoa wrote: 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 t…

I bet Apple's experience moving from PowerPC to X86 gave them a leg up as well, and in both cases (PowerPC/X86, MacOS/iOS) they had the power to force developers to cross-develop to maintain access to their platform. Nobody is in a position to force server-side developers to switch to ARM.

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

#119

Post by _ea1k » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

_underfl0w_ wrote: post #85

scraft wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing, but answering the question of are all phones ARM: no, there Intel too. Source: had to add Intel build support for our Android SKUs to run on said phones. Some Unity stats from about 6 months ago indicated: ARMv7: 98.1% Intel x86: 1.7% I think a lot of the Intel stuff has been discontinued, not sure what is actively being developed outside of ARM right now.

This is strange. Maybe like a Windows phone? Where does it get those device metrics? < 2% makes me think it might just be that Androidx86 emulator project.

There have been a few Intel Android phones. For example, this one: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/03/28/possibly-last-intel...

Tablet list: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/devices-sys...

(and there were a lot of small brands that used to make them, that I don't believe get represented in that list)

Having said that, for it to reach >1%, it was more likely a combination of Intel Android tablets (which were fairly common for a while) and Chromebooks.

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

#120

Post by AstralStorm » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

deng wrote: 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…

If Apple makes such hardware, it will be just a matter of time to port Linux to it. Probably easier than getting it to run on yet another weird internal architecture of a smartphone.

And you can run Linux on that Yoga. It's just Windows for ARM that is the disaster...