armv8 / aarch64 is interesting on the (low power) server side.
Well there is a lot of debate over the fork of Node.js and so far there hasn't been a ground breaking reason for it other than newer versions of popular dependencies and faster release cycles. I think supporting new architectures (specifically mobile ones) is a big deal for the fork and an important distinction from Node.
Isn't this bad for the community? If they diverge more there is going to be a bigger split that hurts everyone.
Why would it? I have a choice of hundreds of languages and frameworks. Objective C didn't make C worse, nor did C++, C# or countless other languages that don't start with a C. In truth, they all keep making each other better with competing features.
There's a definite cost to forking, and whether the benefits justify the cost comes down to whether you believe the pre fork project was being shepherded well prior to the fork. It's a nuclear option to be sure, but it is needed from time to time.
Mobile ... it brings mobile to the table.
What does that bring to the table? (Not trying to be facetious, just not sure what that would buy me)
Current mobile processors are fairly powerful; some of them are faster than low end notebooks. I'd love to be able to test apps on the tablet and plug the tablet/phone to a monitor and keyboard to write code. Given that I write a lot of server-side JS code, iojs working on ARM64 is exciting to me.