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?
JavaScript and TS are script languages with little to nothing to do with threading
I’ve got an ARM Mac. I’ve got ARM VPSes from Hetzner, and I’m compiling native code for the server.
It’s definitely easier to develop, build, and test on the same architecture, than to deal with cross-compilation and emulation.
So I think Linus is right.
X86 and AMD64 based stuff is fairly standard in terms of a motherboard with a BIOS/UEFI and peripheral busses. ARM has for a long time been kind of a mess in this regard, and there are several varieties of ARM architecture that don’t play nicely with code compiled for others.
Don’t get me wrong. ARM can be great for certain types of workloads. It’s typically more efficient at lower power than X86, and better at various types of math. That’s why we DO see it available on ARM for certain stuff like Lambda functions, but you probably won’t be running full VM environments on it.
Last: notice how it’s been hard to find certain varieties of Pi and various other stuff running ARM? There’s shortages all over the place but I’m general Intel and AMD have been able to apply demand for their CPU’s.
Yes, devs aren’t tied to hardware, but there are efficiencies of scale to consider
He has a strong opinion, but he hasn’t lost the plot. It’s very reasonable to say you need to develop on the architecture you wanted to deploy to. If you want to be efficient, so most companies are going to deploy to architecture they have locally.
But you’re taking comments from 2019. Nowadays lots of Mac developers develop directly on arm. So by his own argument, those Mac developers would be more comfortable deploying to an arm-based architecture cuz the running on an arm-based architecture.
So broadly I agree with him, or his past comments from 2019, you’re going to need local developer environments, before you’re going to get efficient server software
I hate my M2 Mac because I hate Macs and Docker doesn’t always work correctly.
hates Macs
buys M2 Mac
Have job
Get paid to suffer
As someone dealing with enterprise software for living, what he’s saying absolutely makes sense, and I deal mostly in web applications (where I never really have to worry about the low level stuff).
Just because the top layer seems to be the same, doesn’t mean the underlying ones are. There’s a reason why perfect bug compatibility is a thing (or maybe, was, in RHEL ecosystem?).
Things that looks like slam dunks in theories are never such in practice. Weird bugs pop up from time to time; and believe me, they will!
It might be rare, you may only see it once or twice in a project; but when it happens, you’re gonna want to be ready, or people will question your ability to do your job.
Have you used ARM servers? They’re a massive pain to work with because they just need that one little extra step every time. Oops, this Docker image doesn’t do aarch64, gotta build it yourself. Oops, this package isn’t available, gotta compile it yourself. Oops, this tool doesn’t work, gotta find an alternative or run it through the much slower qemu layer.
The M1 was the first usable ARM development machine for the mainstream and at launch it was plagued with tons of “how do I develop on this” problems. Apple provided x64 compatibility as a workaround for basically every piece of software you want to run being on another platform. Things are moving forward, but I haven’t heard of any companies announcing how their lives improved by switching to Graviton. Maybe if Apple released a 200 core M2 server it would start to make sense to use ARM, but knowing Apple they’d probably force you to run macOS.
Linux was released in 1991, not 1960. There were tons of programming languages out there. BASIC ran on basically anything, as did C++. Pascal and Fortran are still used to write high demand applications to this day. Nobody was stuck with C.
Also, when you actually need performance, Javascript needs to go. Java and dotnet have the same cross platform advantages with much higher speeds. When those become too slow for you (not that hard, they both have huge overhead), you get into the realm of C++ and Rust. After that, you can go one step further, and write your code in C or Fortran (Fortran is especially good at number crunching, beating C at many tasks).
For a while, developers were stuck with compiling stuff for their servers. Then Java came out. Java did what you say Javascript does: write once, run anywhere. Since the late nineties, server architecture does not strictly matter. You can take most .jar files and serve them from your server, your Power9 box, your Android phone, it’ll all just work after downloading a runtime.
Nothing changed, really. The minority of developers running on ARM will usually still deploy to amd64. Unlike in the past, ARM cores on desktop are faster than ARM cores on the server. There’s no benefit to running ARM servers. Running slow software like PHP and Javascript becomes especially problematic on slower hardware, so for those cross platform runtimes, you’re still better off running on amd64. That’s part of the reason why companies like Oracle are handing out free ARM VPS products with tons of free RAM, to convince people to try their ARM product for real.
Maybe Graviton will take off, who knows. People said the same thing about Power9 and they’re saying great stuff about RISC-V too. For now, I don’t see much change.
