Comment by shreyshrey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shreyshrey | Hacker News Reader

Interesting tidbits:

- 150 million amazon prime users globally (equivalent to to combined france + germany population (or) half of US population). Impressive!!

- Rivian is integrating Alexa into its electric vehicle lineup, including its upcoming fleet of 100,000 all-electric Amazon delivery van. Amazon has made investments in Rivian. Going to compete with Tesla?

- Amazon Music has more than 55 million customers worldwide. Collectively, in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Japan, Amazon Music customers have grown nearly 50% year-over-year;

- Prime Video received eight Golden Globe Award nominations, with Fleabag winning Best Television Series, Musical or Comedy, as well as Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy, for Phoebe WallerBridge.

- AWS announced three Arm-based instances (M6g, C6g, R6g) powered by AWS’s new Graviton2 processors, that deliver up to 40% better price and performance than current x86 processor-based instances. Threat to intel?

- AWS announced the general availability of AWS Outposts, a fully-managed service that extends AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. On-premises is gaining strength?

https://ir.aboutamazon.com/static-files/f3589a21-d023-4e4c-9...

never even heard of Amazon Music. I'm surprised it's 1/3rd the size of Prime and as big as Apple Music.

A basic version is included in prime.

As well as with alexa by default, 'Alexa, play the Beatles' is amazon music by default.

Makes me wonder how they define 'customers'

For more $ and better bitrates they have Amazon Music HD which is higher fidelity than Spotify offerings.

I wish they introduced ARM based laptops with the recent developments of Graviton.

My other comment ITT is touting the awesome library compatibility I’ve experienced on ARM, but the problem I see with ARM laptops is that I haven’t seen tons and tons of consumer desktop/laptop apps compiling for ARM (with the sort-of exception of Android apps, many of which rely on Google Play Services).

Getting ARM laptops to work is going to require OS-level changes. If Amazon shipped one now, they’d either need to ship a fork of a linux desktop OS with good app compatibility or wait for MS to crack the ARM walnut with one of their ARM compatibility projects.

I feel pretty confident that this is a “hardware follows software” situation: laptop manufacturers may be tempted to make ARM laptops right now, but I think they’re probably waiting for MS to ship a version of “Windows for ARM” that is generally seen to be successful.

iPhone is ARM. Google cross compiles most of its code in the last X years. Windows 10 runs on ARM. Not sure why you think it would be a problem.

I’d be more concerned about 3rd party developers. It is true that Windows 10 runs on ARM, but from what I’ve heard it’s still kind of rough trying to get a lot of 3rd party apps to run on those laptops. Not to mention the difficulty of trying to get game developers to support Windows+ARM (as opposed to Android or iOS) in large enough numbers that you can fairly say the sentence “you can game on Windows for ARM”.

The distinction of “successfully shipping Windows on ARM” is a subjective one and depends on the needs of each user. Although that being said, I don’t think we can really say “ARM laptops have arrived” until they either have great gaming compatibility or great compatibility with some large group of productivity apps. I think they’ll get there, but they aren’t there in January 2020.

How simple (or difficult) is it to migrate from an x86-based instance to an Arm-based instance?

Depends on if the software you use has packages built for arm. Most major ones do. If so, trivial.

If not, if you have a good CI/CD pipeline, you can just build them yourselves. In that situation, not too bad.

If you don't build your own software and packages you need don't have arm builds, a bit more difficult - you'r going to have to start building things.

If you're using proprietary software, you're at their mercy.

I’m gonna give the unhelpful shot of “it depends” with a chaser mixed from “anecdotal experience”.

Having done a lot of work with Raspberry Pis over the past few years, I’ve been pretty impressed with the number of libraries and packages that compile for ARM. I’ve done stuff like building fullscreen electron apps (for theatre projections), doing some light video processing in ffmpeg, running a plex server, running a DIY Time Capsule (which required formatting a drive with HFS+ and then using some HFS+ based libraries).

There are probably holes: I haven’t tried doing deep learning stuff on a Pi (I’d guess some frameworks work and some don’t but I don’t know which) and to that end I definitely haven’t tried anything CUDA related (I have no idea if Nvidia’s proprietary drivers compile for ARM).

But overall, I get the feeling that with Android a lot of libraries started shipping for ARM, which made Raspberry Pi possible, which has gotten more libraries and packages to ship for ARM, which should hopefully make people’s transition in serverland much easier (especially if you’re doing run of the mill web server stuff).

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