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Linus Torvalds Comments on ARM: Did he lose touch with reality?
(www.realworldtech.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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X86 and AMD64 based stuff is fairly standard in terms of a motherboard with a BIOS/UEFI and peripheral busses. ARM has for a long time been kind of a mess in this regard, and there are several varieties of ARM architecture that don't play nicely with code compiled for others.
Don't get me wrong. ARM can be great for certain types of workloads. It's typically more efficient at lower power than X86, and better at various types of math. That's why we DO see it available on ARM for certain stuff like Lambda functions, but you probably won't be running full VM environments on it.
Last: notice how it's been hard to find certain varieties of Pi and various other stuff running ARM? There's shortages all over the place but I'm general Intel and AMD have been able to apply demand for their CPU's.
Yes, devs aren't tied to hardware, but there are efficiencies of scale to consider
We do see Amazon, Oracle and other providers offering full ARM based VMs, they work fine for the price... Even Facebook have been investing in ARM for their datacenters.
Yes there are, ARM will always be cheaper than Intel and is reaching competitive / comparable levels of performance.
Compute time is significantly cheaper than dev time. 76% of the internet web is powered by PHP and entire services are developed in JS. The average cost of a software developer in the US is 140k, while you can rent a server with 24 cores, 64 GiB of RAM and 4 TiB SSD that can run plenty of badly optimized Node.js docker containers for 90 bucks a month.