By: Aaron Spink (aaronspink.delete@this.notearthlink.net), August 11, 2014 12:57 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Brett (ggtgp.delete@this.yahoo.com) on August 10, 2014 11:45 pm wrote:
> I admit it is a crazy stretch of an idea. But if you remove the need for
> a recompile people will pay $10,000 for the sort of CPU's IBM makes.
>
The problem IBM is having is that people in general won't pay 10k for the sort of CPU's IBM makes. The volume of the market is at a much lower price point. Why buy a boutique machine available from a single vendor when you have a choice of multiple machines with basically the same performance from a wide variety of vendors with much greater software support?
IBM makes great CPUs. The problem is they aren't x86. Switching to ARM doesn't change a thing. And that is the major hurdle for ARM to ever be competitive outside of the phone/tablet market. And the reason they are so successful in the phone/tablet market is because they got there first and have the established installed base.
Market forces generally matter MORE than technical excellence or perceived technical excellence. The graveyard of computing is littered with technical excellence. And its debatable at best whether ARM server CPUs would be technically better than x86 server cpus, esp since ARM server CPUs pretty much don't exist outside of low end NAS where they've actually been losing ground to x86.
> I admit it is a crazy stretch of an idea. But if you remove the need for
> a recompile people will pay $10,000 for the sort of CPU's IBM makes.
>
The problem IBM is having is that people in general won't pay 10k for the sort of CPU's IBM makes. The volume of the market is at a much lower price point. Why buy a boutique machine available from a single vendor when you have a choice of multiple machines with basically the same performance from a wide variety of vendors with much greater software support?
IBM makes great CPUs. The problem is they aren't x86. Switching to ARM doesn't change a thing. And that is the major hurdle for ARM to ever be competitive outside of the phone/tablet market. And the reason they are so successful in the phone/tablet market is because they got there first and have the established installed base.
Market forces generally matter MORE than technical excellence or perceived technical excellence. The graveyard of computing is littered with technical excellence. And its debatable at best whether ARM server CPUs would be technically better than x86 server cpus, esp since ARM server CPUs pretty much don't exist outside of low end NAS where they've actually been losing ground to x86.