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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

#81

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.

It'll be big in embedded, where IP licensing is a significant part of the end price.

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

#82

Interesting theory. I wonder then what will happen when Macbooks start shipping with >A12 CPUs [1], will we see more ARM based servers then? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A12X

It literally won't matter, as Linus explained. As the infrastructure will be x86. This is what he's saying. Unless a new paradigm emerges on drastically different tech, ARM has too far to go to catch up to create an isomorphic environment where the code is created. A few tenths of a percent of mac developers won't make a jot of difference.

Not sure that's what he was saying. I understood that instead of targeting the server-market directly first, he recommends that it would be better to target the developer market first. And if it's popular there, it will naturally bubble up from there into the server market.

Sure it will take more than a few tenth of a percent of mac developers but it won't need total domination like x86 either. But just imagine if Apple really just switches its MacBook (not even the Air or Pro ones) to ARM64 that would already be millions of users. A lot of devs will at least try to compile their app for that platform for the first time. Quite some developers will be curious and get one just to test their software on it. I am pretty sure this is going to help the adoption of ARM64 way more than a slightly improved CPU or another experimental support by a cloud provider.

Personally I don't care too much about ARM64's success (although more competition would certainly be great), I am more rooting for RISC-V and I hope they follow a more developer-first strategy.

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

#84
post #40

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.

The ops guys use Linux.

After SSH was invented, I can use anything (my corporate laptop is a Mac, my personal ones are Linux-running x86's).

To be fair, I was using anything when telnet was not considered suicidal.

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

#85
post #75
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…

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.

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

#86
post #56
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…

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, JVM, Scalia, etc. And the Xeon class machines folks deploy to in data center envs is a world apart from their MacBooks. These truths are true for Linus, but not for the majority of devs. Even those creating native binaries, this is…

He calls that out though "even if you're only running perl scripts". It's not the cross-compilation that's a factor, it's wanting the environment to be as similar as possible.

Even if your code is Java bytecode, that's still running on a different build of the JVM, on a different build of the OS (possibly a different OS). There is opportunity for different errors to crop up. They might be rare, but they'll be surprising and costly when they happen exactly because of that.

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

#87
post #9

> Some people think that "the cloud" means that the instruction set doesn't matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud. That's bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test "at home" (and by "at home" I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment). But developers can ssh to the cloud, and develop there, right?

> But developers can ssh to the cloud, and develop there, right? Then why do they insist on 32GB i9 laptops running MacOS or Linux? One must assume that there is some practical purpose, unless one is rather cynical and believes that maybe the just like shinnies.

.. 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 development.

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

#88

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?

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

#89
post #43

> Some people think that "the cloud" means that the instruction set doesn't matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud. > That's bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test "at home" (and by "at home" I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment). This is why having a compilation target that works the same way everywhe…

> This is why having a compilation target that works the same way everywhere would be so valuable. We're some ways away from this, but I think WebAssembly offers hope here. Why does WebAssembly offer more hope than the JVM, or interpreted languages that we already have? It will still have to interop with native libraries to get work done.

It's lower level than the JVM and more of an abstraction over hardware. So native libraries can be compiled directly into it, so everything can interop on top of Wasm.

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

#90
post #75
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…

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.

I'm wondering how much of this 1.7% are x86 Chromebooks as they support Android apps for some time.
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