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Comment by dis-sys | Hacker News Reader

The specs look pretty interesting on paper, but it is just on paper until average developers are actually allowed to have access to such new ARM platforms at reasonable prices.

ARM managed to take the entire mobile market because those low power consumption ARM SoCs are everywhere, you can buy a tiny ARM board running Linux for $50 or less and there are thousands of sellers on ebay.com/taobao.com. However, it is a completely different situation when it comes to ARM for data centres - it is damn hard to find any 64bit ARM platform that allow you have say 32GBytes RAM and a few PCIE slots at reasonable price (e.g. comparable to Xeons). Not talking about cloud, I want 3 such ARM machines sitting in my home lab working 24/7 at 100% load for me and I need to play on the hardware side a little bit (e.g. try different SSDs).

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Actually, just ordered one. https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/avantek-32-core-cavium-thund... They’re pretty easy to find these days. Soft iron has a desktop box too.

You have your cause and effect backwards -- Arm cores had a huge percentage of the mobile market well before anybody produced a $50 devboard, and indeed the only reason you can get a $50 devboard is because there is enough volume selling SoCs to the mobile market to bring the chip costs down.

I built my first ARM board for around $30 each, $50 is enough to have a pretty decent profit margin on top of that cost. It was a S3C4510 board running uclinux and I did it 14-15 years ago. That chip is one of the first few publicly available SoCs and no it was never used in mobile. There is no such volume.

As of writing, most of those devboards you can see on the market come with an application processor without modem. The ones that really see huge volumes are the ones with integrated modems, e.g. MTK processors with modem or the Snapdragon series, interestingly you are not going to get any of them for $50.

OTOH, the dev boards are the reason why people have been able to run desktop OSs on their ARM-based boards.

Do you know why no desktop software is optimized for Xeon Phi, SPARC, POWER9? Because almost nobody plays with them.

Also, many compilers are already heavily optimized for x86_64 but not so much for ARM64

If you look at the C language then there are two compilers: gcc and clang. Clang uses LLVM as its back end, and is basically an Apple project. It is heavily optimized for arm64 (guess what: Apple uses arm64). LLVM is also the back end for Rust, Julia and many other languages. LuaJIT for example is pretty good on arm64 too.

Not true. Linaro is a thing, ARM also provides a first party compiler that is pretty good.

ARM has a team working on the arm64 GCC implementation so I expect it to be pretty well worked out like their own compiler.

When you look at hand optimised assembly in languages / library ARM is not even close to x64

and what exactly are you comparing to reach this conclusion: "and optimised assembly in languages / library ARM is not even close to x64"?

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