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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

#181

Post by plasticchris »

unilynx wrote: post #177
bayindirh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

--- I accidentally deleted this comment, so, I've re-written it. --- Disclaimer: I'm a HPC system administrator in a relatively big academic supercomputer center. I also develop scientific applications to run on these clusters. > Linus is mostly wrong except for HPC. Very few dev pipelines for folks result in native executables. The vast majority of code is delivered as either source (python, ruby, etc) or bytcode, J…

Isn't turbo boost an issue when comparing/profiling? my experience with video generation/encoding run of about 30 sec was that my macbook outperformed the server xeons... if left to cool down for a few minutes between test runs. otherwise a testrun of 30 seconds would suddenly jump up to over a minute. the xeons though always took about 40 seconds.. but were consistent in that runtime (and were able to do more of the…

Sounds like thermal throttling. I don't think there's any reason turbo can't be continuous if thermals are under control, see https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/frequency_behavior

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

#182

Post by wil421 »

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…

I’ve always thought PCs will become business workstations. Meaning you use them for office work but everything else will be “cars” as your quote put it. Meaning internet browsing, social media, view/edit photos, and the like will be done on some mobile device. Windows is alresdy the de facto business workstation and I don’t see it going away.

There’s already a whole generation or two who will likely have little to no experience with PCs.

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

#183

Post by derefr »

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…

> nearly 100% (or entirely 100%?) literally develop-on-x86-deploy-on-ARM

There may be people somewhere doing Android/ChromeOS/Fuchsia development on ARM Chromebooks, following the Google model of using a mostly cloud-based toolchain together with a local IDE. There’s none of this happening inside Google itself, though, yet—but that’s just because Google issues devs Pixelbooks, and they’re x86 (for now.)

But, since Pixelbooks (and ChromeOS devices in general) just run web and Android software (plus a few system-level virtualization programs like Crouton) there’s nothing stopping them from spontaneously switching any given Chromebook to ARM in a model revision. So, as soon as there’s an ARM chip worth putting in a laptop, expect the Pixelbook to have it, and therefore expect instant adoption of “native development on ARM” by a decent chunk of Googlers. It could happen Real Soon Now (hint hint.)

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

#184

Post by geezerjay »

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…

> but doesn't this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely smartphones.

This is patently false. Mobile developers do test their apps on smartphones, eventhough google and apple offer VMs. You'd be hard pressed to find a mobile app software house that doesn't have a dozen or so smartphones available to their developers to test and deploy on the real thing.

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

#185

Post by jlouis »

thecompilr wrote: post #176

I have to strongly disagree with Linus here. While he got the history up to this point right, in the present it is very easy to develop for multiple platforms at once. CI platforms make it super easy. Cloudflare made a big effort to make all software run on x86 and aarch64, and it wasn't that hard at all. Most things today work out of the box. Many things that don't work, were not very robust to begin with, and fixin…

The CI angle was my first bet as well.

You build and test in the cloud nowadays. Heck, you might develop on MacOS, and deploy on Linux. There are places where it matter, SIMD processing for instance, or low-level kernel development. But if you are on any kind of VM system, or ecosystem with a good compiler history, you are likely to have a smooth ride.

If, in addition, the price point of the ARM machines are at 2/3 of the X86-64 ones, you are in trouble. x86 had another important point up its sleeve: price. And I might expect this was a confounding variable in Linus argument. Not only did you have the x86 at home. It was also like 1/8th of the price of an Alpha, PA-RISC or Sparc machine in price point. And at the time, x86 was dog slow compared to Alpha, and its I/O was laughable compared to HPPA/Sun.

If you have a sizeable invoice at AWS, and you can shave the EC2 price by 2/3rds, you are going to have a lot of wiggle room to make sure your system runs on that aarch64.

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

#186

Post by otterley »

antirez wrote: post #145

It's extremely hard to agree with Linus on that. One problem in his argument is that he believes that everybody has a kernel hacker mindset: most today's developers don't care about environment reproducibility at architecture level. The second problem is that he believes that every kind of development is as platform sensitive as kernel hacking, and he even makes the example of Perl scripts. The reality is that one ye…

I agree with you. For many users of the cloud -- especially serverless application developers -- the actual hardware on which their software runs is a black box. In fact, if the serverless application consists solely of scripts or precompiled bytecode and doesn't contain architecture-specific binary code, it could likely run on arbitrary hardware with any supported ISA and users wouldn't know the difference.

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

#187

Post by mattnewport »

antirez wrote: post #145

It's extremely hard to agree with Linus on that. One problem in his argument is that he believes that everybody has a kernel hacker mindset: most today's developers don't care about environment reproducibility at architecture level. The second problem is that he believes that every kind of development is as platform sensitive as kernel hacking, and he even makes the example of Perl scripts. The reality is that one ye…

A low level piece of code written in C seems likely to have less portability issues than something sitting on top of many layers of abstraction. The thorny problems that show up deploying on an environment that's not identical to the development environment are often the result of unexpected interactions in the stack of dependencies. This is why containerization is a thing.

Platform portability issues have got easier with better adherence to standards and where you have largely the same code running across different ISAs (and no endianness issues between x86 and Arm) but the popularity of things like Docker suggest many devs do care about reproducible production environments.

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

#188

Post by disiplus »

TechieKid wrote: post #175
disiplus wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he just said its not worth it and as a developer if i could chose that i develop on the platform that will run my code i will chose it even if its slightly more expensive. granted that on both i could be same level of productive. we had those problems when developing in scripting language on windows a code that will run on linux because at some point we needed something that called native and would make us problems w…

Usage of punctuation would make your attempt at communication more likely to serve its purpose.

thx, noted. was on my phone and wanted to reply quickly.

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

#189

Post by pjmlp »

rjsw wrote: post #168
pjmlp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With rich language runtimes, as app developer I don't care if my application instance runs on top of an OS, hypervisor or just plain bare metal. The only devs that need to care about the native part are the ones writing the glue between runtime and hardware.

Somebody has to maintain the runtimes, they are not typically set up to be cross-compilable, I'm doing JVM development on my ARM systems right now.

Apparently you stop reading at the first sentence.

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

#190

Post by rjsw »

pjmlp wrote: post #189
rjsw wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody has to maintain the runtimes, they are not typically set up to be cross-compilable, I'm doing JVM development on my ARM systems right now.

Apparently you stop reading at the first sentence.

I'm not working on "glue between runtime and hardware".
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