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Linus Torvalds Comments on ARM: Did he lose touch with reality? (www.realworldtech.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

ARM on Mac isn't nearly as helpful for workloads on an ARM server as x86 PC for an x86 server. The differences in hardware behavior between the two x86 parts is small because the platforms are standardized way beyond the instruction set. The ARM server on the other hand has nothing to do with the Mac beyond the instruction set. Something runs great on your Mac because of the on-SoC ridiculously fast RAM. You throw it on an ARM server with completely different ARM CPUs, slotted RAM and a bottleneck shows up.

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