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Comment by raybb | Hacker News Reader

I'm ignorant here. Why does it matter to you if your code is running on ARM or x86?

Support for arm is not as pervasive as x86, if you are using docker you need to be mindful of the base images

One advantage of Amazon's ARM is that it doesn't do hyperthreading, so when you rent a "thread" you actually get a full core rather than half a core.

Or in other words, when your ARM without SMT stalls, the execution resources are wasted, as Xenu intended. Letting another program use the functional units unused by your program is an abomination before Xenu.

Which ironically would probably prevent adoption of ARM. People care about and compare core counts.

Get a single core ARM instance for almost the price of a double core x86 instance. Not a great marketing speech.

No, it's the opposite. An ARM core is much cheaper than an x86 core so you can get more cores for the money. And an ARM core is cheaper than an x86 thread while providing more consistent performance.

Optionality, choice, ultimately the freedom.

For one thing, everyone is painfully aware of Intel's monopoly pricing a few years ago before AMD came back to life. To prevent this, 3 supplier of CPUs seems minimal, so there can be dynamism of check and balance. (2 is insufficient, as seen from Intel vs. AMD)

If other people want to run on ARM, then I need to test my code on ARM, so that's why I want it.

It doesn't, that's what's great about it. But ARM equipment is generally better value than x86 and I would expect Google to offer it as a more affordable target config (like AWS does).

So, if Google offers a better value on x86, it's equivalent to AWS offering a better value on ARM.

Google doesn't own a company that designs ARM processors (IIRC)

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