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Comment by jarym | Hacker News Reader

It’s also like looking at the iPhone in 2007 and saying Nokia can do x/y/z to keep the upstart out.

Fact is, mis-placed corporate focus and the sense of superiority kicks these companies off top spot.

Intel, as it stands this minute IS next.

They can’t price like ARM, they don’t have the scale that ARM devices have - those two things are what Intel usually relies on itself to dominate competitors (eg like AMD).

Add to this that Intel really is focussed on growing its business outside of chips and continually dropping the ball on the chip side (how late is CoffeeLake? Can anyone understand their marketing kefudgery with the generational mixture of chips?) and it’s an absolute recipe for corporate implosion.

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>they don’t have the scale that ARM devices have

It is the other way around when you are talking about Server market. The Scale of ARM devices in IoT or even Samrtphone has near zero advantage on Server. ( The instruction set, x86-64 / ARMv8 matters very little )

There is a solid ecosystem for building arm instruction set mobile phones to run Android.

There are lots of little tiny IoT type things that run the arm instruction set and do it really well, but they are not in the same class as serious server motherboards.

ARM is just now barely scratching the surface of the number of pci-express 3.0 "lanes" you can get with one EPYC or threadripper socket.

There is nearly zero current ecosystem of serious server motherboards to run Linux either bare metal or with the kvm or xen hypervisors. Things with a lot of ddr4 ram, m.2 nvme SSD PCI Express slots, pci-express 3.0 x16 slots, 10 and 100 Gbps NICs (SFP+ and qsfp28 form factor).

Every arm server board I have ever seen to date is a special one off low quantity thing produced for a special purpose.

As it stands right now a manufacturer like supermicro can fit four single socket motherboards in a 2RU chassis, and populate them with something like the $750 EPYC 16-core which will run circles around anything arm based. Or a cloud scale operator can put a whole shitload of 1U size individual chassis into use with standard atx size motherboards and populate them with $275 each, ryzen 7 2700 CPUs.

> which will run circles around anything arm based.

Do you have a single number to back that up?

I'm not sure how you can believe that. Right now the biggest problem is total lack of availability of ARM servers. Perhaps Qualcomm's Amberwing is competitive but the only source of information about it is from Cloudflare in SIMD workloads. Infrastructure like networking is an obvious target for ARM servers because it can be accellerated via SIMD but is the performenace good enough for regular application development like webapps or databases? We don't know and they won't tell us. The only reason to believe or hope that they are superior is because you have a grudge against the established players.

I don't even claim that ARM is better than Intel on SIMD workloads. Quite the opposite. Intel has AVX2 and AVX512 that rip ARM apart on most highly parallel workloads. This very specific snippet benefits a bit more from ARM SIMD due to the presence of specific instructions lacking in SSE. But AVX512 has so much more instructions, with a much wider application.

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