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?
He is sort of right, back in 2019. Even then, IBM PowerPC mainframe are still thriving.
Now, new language with cross compilation with some maturity are here. Major cloud providers now have ARM base machines ready, even designing to their own need.
ARM is in the datacenter market and become a trend.
The only thing I worried about, is the architecture of ARM are too fractured. AWS Graviton might behave differently than Ampere Altra, despite both have the ARM ISA.
Different cores, different topologies, different interconnects, different memory throughputs… fahgedabouddit.
We saw the same with AMD/Intel building their own instruction sets. AMD has only recently entered the server market as a serious competitor, but limitations like a lack of AVX512 seems not to be a bug issue so far. The result is either binaries with multiple code paths, optimised for each specific design, or binailries only leveraging the common ground.
If an ARM server comes out on top, I’m sure the ARM server market will centralise the same way it did around Intel before EPYC got traction.
With x86, there are AMD and Intel. With ARM, how many designers are here? With more designers, the smaller the potential common ground is, and more code paths to optimize, thus cost more to build.
ARM has their own design team, as does Apple. Google and Microsoft are supposedly also launching their own ARM chips, but they’re behind on Apple by a couple of years. Samsung designs Exynos, Qualcom designs Snapdragon, and then you have Mediatek, and HiSilicon.
Many of these companies start out with the chip designs they’re already paying ARM for and tweak them to their need. Apple is the big exception here, beating ARM at their own game by using ARM’s ISA but designing better chips to run the code than ARM has been able to.