Comment by vonmoltke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vonmoltke | Hacker News Reader

First sentence should be, "Today's GUI-based end user world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64." There are tens of millions of systems where the ability to run a web browser, PDF viewer, or office suite is irrelevant. I'm not talking about bare-metal embedded, either. I mean server and backend systems, HPC systems, RTOS-based systems, and soft real-time processing systems.

I get the impression that the author of this is completely focused on desktop and mobile software and has written an editorial based on the perspective that those are the only realms that exist. I agree with her conclusions with respect to consumer and office platforms, but think she makes the gross error of then projecting that onto the rest of the computing world. Many platforms will stay alive outside of this space with good toolchain support and poor GUI application support.

>> I mean server and backend systems, HPC systems

In HPC x86-64 (in fact, Intel x86-64) is the only thriving architecture: here is the breakdown from the last Top500:

- 445 systems are Intel x86-64

- 21 systems are AMD x86-64

- 19 systems are IBM Blue Gene/Q. IBM discontinued the Blue Gene line, so these systems would be replaced with something else as they age.

- 7 systems are IBM Power 7. There are no IBM Power 8 systems on the list.

- 7 systems are SPARC-based. AFAIK all of them are Fujitsu systems installed in Japan, and they are not accessible to researchers outside of Japan.

- 1 system is based on Chinese ShenWei architecture.

- There are no ARM (neither ARMv7 nor ARM64) systems on the list.

Yeah. But the author seems to have gotten some good money from amd you write about them rather than go out and say that, amd is also dying much like the others.

I highly doubt if arm will ever become a serious contender in the desktop computing market, let alone the hpc market which is even more difficult with what Intel can guarantee.

the author is Miod Vallat, an OpenBSD developer who has "nurtured" many "alternative" architectures' support.

> I'm not talking about bare-metal embedded, either. I mean server and backend systems, HPC systems, RTOS-based systems, and soft real-time processing systems.

What architectures would you consider competitive in each of these areas? As far as I know, most of the areas you listed are migrating to ARM and AMD64 for new designs/installations at a pretty quick pace.

I only know IBM's POWER8 that has interesting applications server-side (massive threading), but otherwise, the future is indeed AMD64/ARM64.

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