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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

#531

Post by nicoburns »

jecxjo wrote: post #384
nicoburns wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's latest iPad processors are competitive with low-end laptop x86 processors. And they have a much stricter power budget than a laptop. If Apple wants to go this route, then they probably have the capability to build the chips to support it.

The part you're discounting is just how resource intensive desktop apps are and how much optimization goes into iOS apps. To really see the benefit of changing they would need to add a lot of cores, and then cross their fingers that 3rd party app developers know how to do true multi-core development.

I don't know about that A-series chips are competive with low-end intel in single-threaded performance. And they keep getting faster each year.

If that team were to design a bigger core aimed at laptops, then I wouldn't be surprised if they could make it competitive.

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

#533

Post by manicdee »

kakwa_ wrote: post #389
Androider wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, if Apple does switch to ARM chips for their laptops, that will make mainstream ARM server-side development more viable than any cross-platform story ever can. Or kill the Mac desktop. One or the other :)

It will most likely kill apple laptops as a developer platform. Unless you are deeply disconnected from the hardware, CPU architecture does matter. Most developers using macbooks I know have VMs for either Windows or Linux works. It might be conceivable to use the ARM port of , or the ARM version of Windows 10. But it would also require a good desktop virtualization solution for ARM. If Apple release its own solution…

I can imagine a neat divide here between “MacBook” (based on ARM, 15 hour battery life) and MacBook Pro (based on Intel i7, 6 hour battery life, optimised for VMs).

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

#534

Post by armboy »

I think the most important question here isn’t whether Arm will win servers.

The assumption would be there, that the cloud market will continue to grow at its current rate and continue to be the valuable market it has been.

What scares intel most is that a new market will emerge for middle and high power compute spread more broadly, and this market will grow explosively faster than data center ever did.

The question is whether these new cores will bring about a new way of structuring the data center, where it is decentralized and spread out more instead of stuck in one building.

A good example is the infrastructure that must go into place to support 5G and self driving cars. Every lamppost will have a server on it.

Arm winning servers becomes irrelevant in that world. If fog / Edge / infrastructure combo blow up the way mobile did, Intel’s little data center slice won’t matter.

Developers will only adapt when there is a big new market to write software for. Data center by itself not sufficient to motivate the change needed.

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

#535

Post by Tor3 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #143
Tor3 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. develop remotely? I can, if I wish. I have an extremely high bandwidth link to servers. But there's still latency, and that makes all the difference. So in practice I always develop locally. I use Git and VNC and sshfs-mounted filesystems to access the remote, but my tools and editors are always local. I can build remotely, but not work remotely. And I still like to build locally all the same, during the actual de…

I find it hilarious that this is the developer attitude for their own work, but then they turn around and expect users to just suck it up and accept latency because cloud!

It's a difference in using a text editor remotely, compared to doing just about anything else remotely. I can log in and build remotely, and execute remotely, use remote git servers, even run GUIs remotely (testing my application through a VNC). But using a text editor remotely, with a few hundred millisecs rtt.. now, that is very different.

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

#536

Post by mcv »

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'm a web developer, and for years now I've been developing on either Mac or Windows, but deploying to Linux servers. Or possibly totally different kinds of servers. I don't care much about the architecture of the server as long as it runs my code. Give me Apache, JVM, node, and the necessary build and deploy tools, and there's nothing I can't run on it.

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

#537

Post by rbanffy »

retzkek wrote: post #298
rbanffy wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to define what "winning" means here. Google uses POWER9 and specialized GPU-like chips for some workloads. All cloud providers can gain from being able to offer products that perform better or have lower prices than it would be possible with x86. Right now ARM probably outnumbers x86 in number of machines running Linux by a very large margin. In my backpack there is one x86 machine and two ARM ones and that d…

> Google uses POWER9 and specialized GPU-like chips As do the current top two supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, among others.

Cray's XC-50 uses ARM CPUs.

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

#538

Post by rbanffy »

pjmlp wrote: post #364
rbanffy wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know some software was written on minis to run on 8-bit computers, but I have a hard time imagining that as the norm. My Apple II dev rig was two computers, one running development tools and one to test and they were two because running my software wasn't possible on the development machine without rebooting and loading all the tools took 30 seconds - a painful eternity in Apple II terms.

It was quite common in the game industry. As confirmed by multiple interviews on the RetroGaming Magazine, almost every indie that managed to get enough pounds to carry on with their dream, invested into such setup when they started going big.

For consoles, it's natural - they don't have any self-hosted development tools and the machine you write your code with is largely irrelevant. Early adopters also benefit from the maturity of the tools in other platforms for the time before native tools are developed.

This may be more common in game studios, but was not mainstream in other segments.

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

#539

Post by koffiezet »

jecxjo wrote: post #383
riffraff wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if the switch to arm comes with a lot more battery life and great performance? Not all Mac users are devs.

I wouldn't imagine you'd get a lot of performance boost from the change. You'll see battery life but that assumes they aren't looking to run a crazy number of cores to make it compete with the x86. And they only way that massive core counts help is if the software is designed to utilize them correctly. Its not that all users are devs. Its that all devs might not be able to make their software work well under that env…

Knowing Apple, they would just go for the 'even lighter' approach, and insert a battery half the size of the current-ones...

A battery lifetime of 8 or 12 hours is plenty, and going beyond that isn't that much of a marketable strategy, unless it has to become 24h+ or something. A lower weight approach however would also mean a lower BOM for Apple, and more profit, while being able to shout "1/3rd lighter!" - and that's an easy sell :)

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

#540

Post by pjmlp »

rbanffy wrote: post #538
pjmlp wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was quite common in the game industry. As confirmed by multiple interviews on the RetroGaming Magazine, almost every indie that managed to get enough pounds to carry on with their dream, invested into such setup when they started going big.

For consoles, it's natural - they don't have any self-hosted development tools and the machine you write your code with is largely irrelevant. Early adopters also benefit from the maturity of the tools in other platforms for the time before native tools are developed. This may be more common in game studios, but was not mainstream in other segments.

It was quite common on C64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum.

Games were developed on bigger systems, and uploaded into them via the expansion ports.

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