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Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Price is the determining factor in the long run. Back in the hey-day of VAX, HP, Sparc etc. we were likely to develop on the same architecture as the application ran on. We might even have developed on the deployment machine; a separate development box would have been a luxury not many could afford for in-house development. It was cheaper hardware that enabled the move to Intel and availability of server OSs that lead to the migration from those platforms. Xenix and SCO enabled Unix applications to move onto Intel; in fact, if SCO hadn't have attempted to follow a high price model I doubt Linux would have come to dominate the Intel Unix-like market. There were plenty of small businesses in the '90s running on SCO and dumb terminals. There was a sub-industry producing multiple serial boards to plug into PC motherboards just to support it. There were also bigger businesses running on multiple Intel processor boxes with Unix OSs such as Dynix.

The move to individual workstations for developers is a separate matter. The PC made it economical for developers to have their own workstations. For someone like Linus that made it possible to develop outside a corporate environment. For traditional architectures as shared server sufficed for many of us working on server/dumb terminal-based applications. I suspect Netware might have prompted the adoption of individual workstations in corporate development. My limited encounter of that left me with an impression that development on a server, especially one that was also running production. would have been too fraught. A separate workstation would have been needed for graphical applications, even for Unix, as the X-terminal really never caught on. This, of course, is where Windows came in and changed things.

As to the future ISTM that the determining factors over the next few years will be the ability to mitigate the likes of Meltdown in Intel/AMD architecture* in the next generation of products and the adoption of ARM in workstations in a configuration consistent with those of servers.

* An interesting aspect is whether Intel and AMD diverge in the process.

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