tr:dr; he says “x86 took over the server market” because it was the same architecture developers in companies had on their machines thus it made it very easy to develop applications on their machines to then ship to the servers.
Now this, among others he made, are very good points on how and why it is hard for ARM to get mainstream on the datacenter, however I also feel like he kind lost touch with reality on this one…
He’s comparing two very different situations, more specifically eras. Developers aren’t so tied anymore like they used to be to the underlaying hardware. The software development market evolved from C to very high language languages such as Javascript/Typescript and the majority of stuff developed is done or will be done in those languages thus the CPU architecture becomes irrelevant.
Obviously very big companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon are more than happy to pay the little “tax” to ensure Javascript runs fine on ARM than to pay the big bucks they pay for x86…
What are your thoughts?
The luxuries you have to not know a thing about enterprise grade servers because your world is JavaScript was made possible, and continues to be made possible, by people working on layers that do require familiarity with the underlying hardware.
Right, whenever someone like Linus talks about developers he’s probably not referring to your run-of-the-mill code monkey making simple web apps.
Okay… that’s fair, but “your run-of-the-mill code monkey” that writes JS is the majority of the market nowadays and it will only grow more.
They’re going to be writing the firmware for enterprise grade servers? If not, they’re irrelevant to what Linus is talking about here.
To be fair, the people doing ARM optimisations aren’t the people working on enterprise servers. V8, Spidermonkey, and JavascriptCore all need to run as fast and efficient as possible on phones and laptops, constrained by battery power. The goals of enterprise servers and mobile browser developers align nicely, but I don’t think there’s much overlap between the two.
Of course someone still needs to write drivers for server hardware, but the Javascript stuff mostly comes for free from Google (if you use Node) or Apple (if you use Bun).
I think people underestimate the challenges involved when building software systems tightly coupled to the underlying hardware (like if you are a team tasked with building a next gen server).
Successful companies in the space don’t underestimate it though, the engineers who do the work don’t underestimate it, and Linus doesn’t underestimate it either.
The domain knowledge in your org required to mitigate the business risk isn’t trivial. The value proposition always needs to be pretty juicy to overcome the inertia present caused by institutional familiarity. Like, can we save a few million on silicon? Sure. Do we think we understand the challenges well enough to keep our hardware release schedules without taking shortcuts that will result in reputational impact? Do we think we have the right people in place to oversee the switch?
Over and over again, it comes back to “is it worth it”, and it’s much more complex of a question to offer than just picking the cheaper chips.
I imagine at this point there is probably a metric fuckton of enterprise software what strictly dictate that it must be run on X86. Even if it doesn’t have to. If you stray from the vendor hardware requirements, bullshit or not, you’ll lose your support. There is likely friction on some consumer segments as well on the uptake.
And that underlying stuff doesn’t run the same on x86 and dog knows who’s ARM implementation.
This is awesome.
Yeah but you have to write Javascript. :-D
That’s kind my point… Since everyone is or will be coding on Javascript (or other languages that run on virtual machines / “layers”) general developers won’t have a problem running on ARM datacenters anymore. Big cloud providers will take the opportunity to move to ARM as it is cheaper for them.
And btw, the people making JS fast and stable on ARM are, most likely, not that familiar with server grade hardware. They’re optimizing for phones and whatever where ARM was born.
The cloud isn’t a literal empheral cloud. It’s still a physical thing with physical devices physically linked. Physical ram on physical slots with physical buses and physical chips (not just CPUs, many other ICs are in those machines too). The complexity of the demands of the arrangement and linkages of that physical hardware is incredible.
Nobody is out there writing enterprise server firmware in java. How can you have a java VM when the underlying compents of the physical device don’t have the necessary code to offer the services required by the VM to run?
To be incredibly blunt, and I don’t say this to be rude, your questions and assertions are incredibly ignorant. So much so that it’s essentially nonsense. It’s like asking “why do we still even have water when we have monster energy drink?” It demonstrates such a fundamental misunderstanding of the premise that it’s honestly difficult to even know where to begin explaining how faulty the line of thinking even is.
Linus isn’t talking about JS developers at all. Even a little bit. I promise you, you would not enjoy hearing his unfiltered thoughts on JS developers.
He’s talking about the professional engineers who design, build, and write firmware for enterprise grade servers. There no overlap between JS coders and these engineers.
Are you drunk? The guy literally speaks about cross-platform and higher level stuff, let me quote him for you:
lol
In this case the reason that you see the rest of the pack in your rear view mirror isn’t because you’re in the lead: it’s because you’re getting lapped.
I strongly encourage you to reach out to Linus directly to inform him of your insights. Please post back with the results.