anon (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on February 21, 2019 7:34 pm wrote:
> Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on February 21, 2019 8:03 am wrote:
> > Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on February 21, 2019 12:53 am wrote:
> > >
> > > Linus is the ultimate unixoid. I paid attention that even
> > > less devoted unixoids are high on native development.
> > > For me, as one that drinks and breaths cross-development all his professional
> > > life, it sounds strange, but this mindset is not rare at all.
> >
> > I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does
> > cross-development, the platform won't be all that stable.
> >
> > Or successful.
> >
> > Some people think that "the cloud" means that the instruction
> > set doesn't matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud.
> >
> > That's bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy
> > on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test "at home" (and by "at home"
> > I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment).
> >
> > Which means that you'll happily pay a bit more for x86 cloud hosting, simply because it matches
> > what you can test on your own local setup, and the errors you get will translate better.
> >
> > This is true even if what you mostly do is something ostensibly cross-platform like just run perl
> > scripts or whatever. Simply because you'll want to have as similar an environment as possible,
> >
> > Which in turn means that cloud providers will end up making more money from their x86 side, which
> > means that they'll prioritize it, and any ARM offerings will be secondary and probably relegated
> > to the mindless dregs (maybe front-end, maybe just static html, that kind of stuff).
> >
> > Guys, do you really not understand why x86 took over the server market?
>
> But a sub-par 8 core dev platform does not help you. Why would anybody buy such a thing?
> Especially if their servers are all x86 -- it's the exact same problem but in reverse!
>
> You have a chicken and egg problem right? A shitty arm laptop
> is not going to help get servers off the ground.

Ares is not shitty, it has x86 performance.
You will get four times the cores for the same price, in a laptop power envelope.
ARM will take off in all x86 markets at the same time, laughing at Intel market segmentation.

> I don't disagree about the big advantage of common ISA and uarch, but that won't happen. Or, it only happens
> after some time. And only if they can actually sell things with real advantages. And they think they have
> possible server advantage with throughput/watt, so that's where they have to go after, surely.
>
> Then you would actually drive some incentive to sell arm laptops to developers even
> if they were not so good as x86 ones. People (and companies) would buy them to work
> on because that's what their fleet runs, or that's what their cloud systems run.
>
> >
> > It wasn't just all price. It was literally this "develop at home" issue. Thousands of small
> > companies ended up having random small internal workloads where it was easy to just get a random
> > whitebox PC and run some silly small thing on it yourself. Then as the workload expanded, it
> > became a "real server". And then once that thing expanded, suddenly it made a whole lot of sense
> > to let somebody else manage the hardware and hosting, and the cloud took over.
> >
> > Do you really not understand? This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story.
> > This is literally what happened, and what killed all the RISC vendors, and made x86 be
> > the undisputed king of the hill of servers, to the point where everybody else is just
> > a rounding error. Something that sounded entirely fictional a couple of decades ago.
> >
> > Without a development platform, ARM in the server space is never going to make it. Trying to sell a
> > 64-bit "hyperscaling" model is idiotic, when you don't have customers and you don't have workloads
> > because you never sold the small cheap box that got the whole market started in the first place.
> >
> > The price advantage of ARM will never be there for ARM servers unless you get enough volume to make
> > up for the absolutely huge advantage in server volume that Intel has right now. Being a smaller die
> > with cheaper NRE doesn't matter one whit, when you can't make up for the development costs in volume.
> > Look at every ARM server offering so far: they were not only slower, they were more expensive!
> >
> > And the power advantage is still largely theoretical and doesn't show very much on
> > a system level anyway, and is also entirely irrelevant if people end up willing to
> > pay more for an x86 box simply because it's what they developed their load on.
> >
> > Which leaves absolutely no real advantage to ARM.
> >
> > This is basic economics.
> >
> > And the only way that changes is if you end up saying "look, you can deploy more cheaply
> > on an ARM box, and here's the development box you can do your work on".
> >
> > Actual hardware for developers is hugely important. I seriously claim
> > that this is why the PC took over, and why everything else died.
> >
> > So you can pooh-pooh it all you want, and say "just cross-build", but as long as you do that, you're going
> > to be a tiny minority, and you don't see the big picture, and you're ignoring actual real history.
> >
> > And btw, calling this an "unixoid" mindset is just showing what a total disconnect to reality
> > you have, and how stupid your argument is. Unix lost. Yes, it lives on in the shape of Linux,
> > but Unix lost not just to Linux, but to Windows. In fact, arguably it lost to windows first.
> >
> > Why? Same exact reason, just on the software side. In both cases. Where did you find developers?
> > You found them on Windows and on Linux, because that's what developers had access to. When those
> > workloads grew up to be "real" workloads, they continued to be run on Windows and Linux, they weren't
> > moved over to Unix platforms even if that would have been fairly easy in the Linux case. No, that
> > was just unnecessary and pointless work. Just continue to deploy on the same platform.
> >
> > Exact same issue on the software side as with the hardware. Cross-development is pointless
> > and stupid when the alternative is to just develop and deploy on the same platform. Yes,
> > you can do it, but you generally would like to avoid it if at all possible.
> >
> > End result: cross-development is mainly done for platforms that are so weak as to make it
> > pointless to develop on them. Nobody does native development in the embedded space. But whenever
> > the target is powerful enough to support native development, there's a huge pressure to
> > do it that way, because the cross-development model is so relatively painful.
> >
> > The corollary to the above is that yes, cross-development is also done when the target environment
> > is too expensive to do native development on. That was the case for the big iron and traditional
> > big Unix boxes. But that seriously erodes support for the expensive platform, and makes the cheap
> > development platform much more able and likely to grow up into that space.
>
> Quibbling and handwaving about exact contributions aside, I don't entirely disagree with you.
>
> >
> > It's why x86 won. Do you really think the world has changed radically?
>
> The world changed radically because Linux! Linux, open source, (and maybe a
> lesser extent, maturing languages and toolchains and build systems etc).
>
> It is still an advantage, but it's a much smaller one today, to develop, test, and run on the same hardware
> platform. Because the software platform is the same and everything works much more similarly.