461–470 of 545 posts
Saying there's no ARM "at home" is closed-minded to say the least - it's already here - clusters of ARM boards are everywhere, laptops are rapidly gaining ground and I'm currently buying the parts for my first desktop-class ARM machine.
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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 know about the standard offerings on cloud platforms, but people who do some sort of scientific computing care a great deal about the architecture and performance. As a C++ programmer, I'm constantly profiling my code to find out bottlenecks and optimize the code. Sometimes I even care if the CPU supports say AVX or some specific instructions.
I'm not saying that nobody cares about the choice of architecture, I'm saying that major tech companies with vast quantities of servers are beginning to develop their own silicon with custom architectures and custom instruction sets, precisely because that's vastly more efficient than using a general-purpose architecture that happens to be popular in the wider software ecosystem. The fact that nobody else uses that special-purpose architecture is unimportant, because it is economically viable for them to invest in tooling and training to write and port software for these weird chips.
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JOKE OF THE DAY. And passes the savings onto me. Oh man that’s a good one.
As the spot history charts depict, AWS pricing continues to drop. To break through any floor requires a disruptive change in architecture (CPU or otherwise). https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-sp...
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.
I'm curious why you believe that. Aside from the hype and the association with the word "open", I honestly can't think of anything interesting or important about RISC-V.
https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/02/05/the-era-of-general-p...
https://www.sigarch.org/simd-instructions-considered-harmful...
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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.
Indeed you might not, but the person that wrote your JVM does, and the person that wrote the system that runs on does, and the person that wrote GAE does... That single instance you're running on already took half a dozen or so other systems developers and more before it got to you, so in your example you're the minority. It's because of the work they've done, that you can not care about the architecture you're runni…
Linus' argument is that x86 stays on top because everyone is developing with x86 at home. It's much less convincing to argue that x86 will stay on top because the people writing JVMs use x86 at home. There just aren't that many of them, and if they get paid to write ARM, they write ARM.
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As the spot history charts depict, AWS pricing continues to drop. To break through any floor requires a disruptive change in architecture (CPU or otherwise). https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-sp...
AWS is still 10x-100x more expensive than renting bare-metal unmetered servers and running everything yourself, so I don't think the actual hardware factors too much into their pricing.
Only if you value your time at zero.
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AWS is still 10x-100x more expensive than renting bare-metal unmetered servers and running everything yourself, so I don't think the actual hardware factors too much into their pricing.
more expensive than...running everything yourself Only if you value your time at zero.
Those bare-metal servers are basically 1:1 what you are developing on.
I can install an instance of my application on them in minutes.
It's AWS that takes significantly more time to set up and learn.
Most people using AWS are spending big bucks on an 'automatically scaling' architecture (that never just works) that will cost them many thousands of dollars a month, which they could have comfortably fit on a 30 bucks dedicated server.
You can pay a dedicated system administrator to run your server (let's not kid ourselves, you probably just need one server) and still save money compared to AWS.
With AWS you're not only paying Amazon, you're probably also paying someone who will spent most of his time just making sure your application fits into that thing.
Take my use-case for example: I can run my entire site on about 8 dedicated servers + other stuff that costs me ~600-700 euros a month.
Those just work month after month (rarely have to do anything).
Just my >400TB of traffic would cost me 16,000 bucks / month on AWS. I could scale to the whole US population for that money if I spent it on dedicated servers instead and just ran them myself.
I do agree with the idea that a cross-compiled environment makew your target environment “more distant” and this is less efficient. However I don’t think that’s at all what’s limiting ARM from cracking the server market.
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I'm with Linus on this one. I had the pleasure (?) of working on a C/C++ codebase that compiled on Windows and ten different flavors of Unix. It was all "portable", but all over the place there was stuff like #if defined AIX || defined OSF1 short var; #else int var; #endif And to get it right, you had to compile it on all the platforms and fix all the errors (and preferably all the warnings). Yeah, cross platform is…
How many years ago was that? POSIX compliance has come a long way and most of the proprietary vendors (the ones with all the corner cases) are gone. These days not only do platforms like AIX and Solaris have much fewer corner cases, they're even adopting Linux and GNU extensions wholesale. Anyhow, most people can ignore these altogether. Portability between Linux and the BSDs is much easier. macOS is the biggest outl…