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Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

> I think I'll side with Linus on this one. I saw first-hand how non-existent the x86 Android market was, despite Intel pouring megabucks into the project.

Doesn't that refute Linus' argument, not strengthen it? Almost all Android developers develop on x86. Intel thought, as Linus apparently does, that this would drive adoption of x86 on phones. It didn't.

Intel even got competitive in power efficiency and it wasn't enough to save them. In fact, I remember folks on HN predicting the imminent death of ARM all the way up to Intel throwing in the towel.

I think Linus is wrong here. His argument made sense in the '90s, but it's 2019. The ISA just doesn't matter that much anymore.

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Phones are different than servers though. The primary customer of a phone is Joe Somebody who doesn't know or care about architectures, only battery life and cost. Well ARM wins there.

The primary customer of servers is developers who care less about cost and more about time to market.

To add on to this: developers don't get choose what architecture a customer's phone uses. If they could, perhaps they would choose x86.

For servers, developers are often the customers of their own software.

I'm a developer deploying code to JVMs running in a PaaS (Google App Engine). I don't know or care what the architecture is.

Likewise... most of my code runs on Lambda JVMs now.

If AWS switches to running JVMs on ARM, and passes the cost savings onto me, I'd be in no position to argue.

Indeed you might not, but the person that wrote your JVM does, and the person that wrote the system that runs on does, and the person that wrote GAE does...

That single instance you're running on already took half a dozen or so other systems developers and more before it got to you, so in your example you're the minority.

It's because of the work they've done, that you can not care about the architecture you're running on, not in spite of them.

Sure, but every time you move down the stack a level, you shrink the network effect by several orders of magnitude.

Linus' argument is that x86 stays on top because everyone is developing with x86 at home. It's much less convincing to argue that x86 will stay on top because the people writing JVMs use x86 at home. There just aren't that many of them, and if they get paid to write ARM, they write ARM.

Indeed, but by at home he means in the office too (he says as much), and I don't see offices don't this unless they have a real incentive to throw out the hardware they've invested in, perhaps in the not so near future when they inevitably have to replace it all due to failure the arm stuff will have a chance to take some share.

When I deploy to PaaS or servless cloud instances, I couldn't care less if they are running on OS xyz, hypervisor or bare metal.

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