431–440 of 545 posts
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…
So RISC-V CPU designers should aim for the developer market then? First win the hearts and minds of developers, then everything else will come.
Allowing to debug, experiment, without relying on centralized hosting providers -- would be a huge boon to Risc-V.
Early adaptors will be developers, than their family/friends circle. Then there will be Risc-V-First movement (mirroring mobile-first movement), and there it will start...
> So RISC-V CPU designers should aim for the developer market then? First win the hearts and minds of developers, then everything else will come.
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I'm suffering through this now -- I have a custom C++ Node exception that needs to run on both x64 and ARM. The ARM cpu is onboard a mobile robot, where I care about power draw. The good news is that Clang can cross-compile fairly easily. Much better than gcc. The bad news is that there are a surprising number of missing libraries on Ubuntu/ARM64. For example, Eigen3. And although the code is fairly compatible, there…
Have you tried compiling with address sanitizer? https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html Unfortunately C++ code is only portable if it is free from undefined behavior. Fortunately there are many tools now to debug these kinds of errors: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1520
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I consider myself a pretty average Mac user, and I've already been turned off by the last couple rounds of Macs that Apple has shipped. Messing up the one remaining upside, x86 compatibility, would be be the straw that broke the camel's back. They still only have single digit market share in desktop computing, this could be the death blow for their platform.
I'm on a 2013 retina, because nothing in the meantime offered incentive to switch. I'm wondering how a switch to ARM would affect that.
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"Run your code on our boxes" is a very, very small subset of cloud services. Does anyone other than Facebook care what instruction set they're using to ingest images? Does anyone other than Amazon care what instruction set they're using to serve S3 requests? Does anyone other than Google care what architecture they're using to crawl the web or serve ads or do something creepy with neural nets?
I don't get it. Having your software being able to run on two different plaforms, means that that software need to be tested twice, maintained twice. Your architecture decision might be optimal for one platform but not for the other, so you have to change your development process, have test env for both platforms, etc. You can't just cross-compile and hope it works. All of this costs money, in terms of either having…
Google's data centers collectively use more electricity than the state of Rhode Island, or about the same as the entire country of Costa Rica. Their electricity consumption has doubled in the last four years. At average wholesale prices, their annual electricity bill would be about a billion dollars. ARM isn't dramatically more efficient than x86 in most applications, but specialised ASICs can be orders of magnitude more efficient.
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I'm a developer deploying code to JVMs running in a PaaS (Google App Engine). I don't know or care what the architecture is.
Likewise... most of my code runs on Lambda JVMs now. If AWS switches to running JVMs on ARM, and passes the cost savings onto me, I'd be in no position to argue.
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I don't have production experience with ARM unfortunately but Raspberry Pi is huge... Linux on desktop sucks if you have any laptop or something like this, but specific hardware just like RPi, everything works for my needs. I have node.js, .net core, python and loads of software that just works for me on ARM. Let alone I have Synology with ARM processor. Making servers is a lot easier than making consumer grade lapto…
I ran Pis at home for a bunch of services and I agree it did a great job. But when you put actual loads on it the device craters because they are so under powered. This is where THE issue is going to be. To get speeds you expect out of server hardware its not just about making a 64 core ARM. Single Core ARM vs Single Core x86 has an obvious winner. So you need to make node and .net core and python and everyone else r…
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Node and Ruby applications do fail on ARM though, when it comes to native libraries and extensions. And now your whole distro is different than your development machine, which adds complexity. Do I really want to be debugging why node-gyp fails to compile scrypt on the ARM distro on the new Amazon A1 ARM instance (which it did in my case)? And if I solve that, what about the other 2451 dependencies? Let's pessimistic…
I'm suffering through this now -- I have a custom C++ Node exception that needs to run on both x64 and ARM. The ARM cpu is onboard a mobile robot, where I care about power draw. The good news is that Clang can cross-compile fairly easily. Much better than gcc. The bad news is that there are a surprising number of missing libraries on Ubuntu/ARM64. For example, Eigen3. And although the code is fairly compatible, there…
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…
>It's extremely hard to agree with Linus on that. It's very easy to disagree with him, because the server market doesn't work the way he think it does. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook collectively purchased 31% of all the servers sold in 2018. The market for server hardware is dominated by a handful of hyperscale operators. The "long tail" is made up of a few dozen companies like SAP, Oracle, Alibaba and Tence…
Are there any thumb drive ARM computers? (Preferably with 64-bit ARMv8 processors to match emerging server platforms.) With pluggable ARM mini-computers it might be easy to develop for ARM.
Raspberry Pi would be interesting, but they have old 32-bit processors and I'm not sure how well they interface with a normal computer. Servers are using 64-bit ARMv8.
Maybe smartphones would work as pluggable mini-computers? I heard that OnePlus devices were explicitly root-friendly, but I've never tried it.