tr:dr; he says “x86 took over the server market” because it was the same architecture developers in companies had on their machines thus it made it very easy to develop applications on their machines to then ship to the servers.
Now this, among others he made, are very good points on how and why it is hard for ARM to get mainstream on the datacenter, however I also feel like he kind lost touch with reality on this one…
He’s comparing two very different situations, more specifically eras. Developers aren’t so tied anymore like they used to be to the underlaying hardware. The software development market evolved from C to very high language languages such as Javascript/Typescript and the majority of stuff developed is done or will be done in those languages thus the CPU architecture becomes irrelevant.
Obviously very big companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon are more than happy to pay the little “tax” to ensure Javascript runs fine on ARM than to pay the big bucks they pay for x86…
What are your thoughts?
The luxuries you have to not know a thing about enterprise grade servers because your world is JavaScript was made possible, and continues to be made possible, by people working on layers that do require familiarity with the underlying hardware.
Right, whenever someone like Linus talks about developers he’s probably not referring to your run-of-the-mill code monkey making simple web apps.
And that underlying stuff doesn’t run the same on x86 and dog knows who’s ARM implementation.
Yeah but you have to write Javascript. :-D
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I think people underestimate the challenges involved when building software systems tightly coupled to the underlying hardware (like if you are a team tasked with building a next gen server).
Successful companies in the space don’t underestimate it though, the engineers who do the work don’t underestimate it, and Linus doesn’t underestimate it either.
The domain knowledge in your org required to mitigate the business risk isn’t trivial. The value proposition always needs to be pretty juicy to overcome the inertia present caused by institutional familiarity. Like, can we save a few million on silicon? Sure. Do we think we understand the challenges well enough to keep our hardware release schedules without taking shortcuts that will result in reputational impact? Do we think we have the right people in place to oversee the switch?
Over and over again, it comes back to “is it worth it”, and it’s much more complex of a question to offer than just picking the cheaper chips.
I imagine at this point there is probably a metric fuckton of enterprise software what strictly dictate that it must be run on X86. Even if it doesn’t have to. If you stray from the vendor hardware requirements, bullshit or not, you’ll lose your support. There is likely friction on some consumer segments as well on the uptake.
That’s kind my point… Since everyone is or will be coding on Javascript (or other languages that run on virtual machines / “layers”) general developers won’t have a problem running on ARM datacenters anymore. Big cloud providers will take the opportunity to move to ARM as it is cheaper for them.
And btw, the people making JS fast and stable on ARM are, most likely, not that familiar with server grade hardware. They’re optimizing for phones and whatever where ARM was born.