Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

I don't really think cloud vendors are holding their breath to switch to ARM, they are all heavily invested in X86. All their code has been built on it for forever, and there's a big advantage to having your dev machines running the same architecture as your cloud production machines. I think desktop ARM adoption would have to happen before the server market moves to the same.

View on HN

AWS has multiple generations of its own ARM processor. I can't say anything about it, as I have no experience with it. I know it's at least two generations in and they claim 40% cheaper for similar workloads.

What I can say is that this level of investment is large.

They look pretty good, check out the benchmarks: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

> their code has been built on it for forever, and there's a big advantage to having your dev machines running the same architecture as your cloud production machines

Is that really so? Are remote development and emulation not sufficiently advanced yet?

Super hot paths might be x86 optimized, but how much does that really matter? I'd think at the scales of the big providers nothing matters more than performance/power use and performance/price.

There’s still no real justification for vendors to even offer ARM instances, and instead become more clear to keep x86 instead with the rising of remote development and emulation.

Tons of x86 code is dereferencing unaligned addresses. Those have to be fixed before porting to ARM.

This isn't applicable to 64-bit Arm at the user application level, don't worry about it.

Prior to that, unaligned memory accesses were perfectly usable on ARMv7 (and even v6) too, this was fixed a while ago.

Desktop and laptop vendors were heavily invested with Intel before now. Apple was heavily invested with Intel before now.

Don’t underestimate what cloud vendors will do in pursuit of cost or efficiency - they are ruthless at both.

For EC2 instances and the like it will be almost all X86 for a long time.

But much of the cloud is made up of services like S3, RDS, Redshift, Route 53, etc. ARM can be very competitive for many of these.

Graviton is looking really interesting.

> For EC2 instances and the like it will be almost all X86 for a long time.

I wouldn't bet on it being so lopsided. AWS is betting stringing it's ARM processors, which appear to have a better price/performance ratio.

> There's a big advantage to having your dev machines running the same architecture as your cloud production machines. I think desktop ARM adoption would have to happen before the server market moves to the same.

The new Apple machines are coming out next year, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com