Hacker News Reader

Comment by discoursism | Hacker News Reader

If you weren't considering Intel alternatives before this, I'd argue that's a real failure of imagination and risk management. I'm sure some of the really small cloud providers weren't, but all the big players keep tabs on the path to and pain of migration, at a minimum. Just because they weren't actually using PowerPC/ARM/AMD does not mean they did not know how.

View on HN

Are PowerPC and ARM real alternatives? Most server software is developed for x86 only, if you only offer ARM and PowerPC machines, who will be your clients?

A lot of server software is actually open source and runs on most commonly available hardware architectures, including ARM and PPC. You are right that everybody develops assuming x86, though, and there is some friction in that transition regardless of software portability.

More important is, are PPC or ARM competitive at the amount of computation per watt, and amount of computation per dollar. Power 8 and 9 are pretty good at number-crunching but also pretty expensive, and I don't know about power efficiency. ARMs used to be pretty power-efficient, but likely cannot offer very high single-threaded performance (must still be great for IO-heavy applications that are hit hardest on Intel).

In the sense that those processors can compute things which are computable, yes, they are a real alternative. The correct question is, "How much worse would the situation have to be with Intel before the cost of these alternatives was less than the benefit of switching to one of them." The answer, I guess, is: "much worse than things are now." However, if you're running at billions in revenue per quarter, you can afford to spend a few million to limit your downside risk by keeping yourself apprised of what the costs would be of moving to another platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com