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

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

“That’s obvioisly true, but in the context of the article the difference between Windows and Linux is much greater than the difference between Linux/x86 and Linux/ARM64.”

Is that correct?

Linus as looking at things from a low level perspective - how can he obtain stability, performance and security from the architecture to deliver an OS or the tools to produce that OS rather than necessarily application layers although there is some overlap.

x86 has a large install base and significant business investment to drive it, particularly as complexity has increased and halted hardware development on other platforms (ie, Itanium) or significantly slowed development (SPARC and MIPS). Intel invests a lot of money in compiler and library improvements and documenting chips to allow others to offer solutions in this space - in the ARM market, many of the performance issues are addressed by co-processors which then makes supporting the SoC that little bit more difficult as many of the coprocessor interfaces are not well supported, making them difficult to exploit at the OS/tool chain level. It can be done, but often adds 2-10 years to the reach the maturity/stability of features delivered on x86 in a few years.

ARM has focussed on low power and while that provides its own set of challenges, getting from ARMs current performance level to x86s performance in the server space will be challenging when we are very close to the end of the current process miniaturisation cycle (2-3 gens at each of 7nm and 5nm with no clear way beyond that). Many of the advances ARM is making in the server space have been tried before (most notably SPARCs high core counts) and ARM has to improve the cache coherency and interconnect issues that limited those solutions.

People are also forgetting Linus’s history - his involvement in Transmeta, his publicly stated preference for POWER and that Linus has been directly or indirectly involved in developing cross-platform for a significant part of his career.

There are niche markets for ARM in the server space - the question is more around can it evolve beyond those niches and challenge the market share of SPARC or POWER in the general purpose space. I suspect we will know based on Apples success moving from x86 to ARM before we will see other vendors produce competitive ARM server solutions because of the resources required to achieve success.

ARM will continue to have considerable market success, even in data centres where it is likely to replace solutions using non-x86 architectures, particularly MIPS. But it won’t replace x86 servers and if something does replace x86, I suspect we haven’t seen it yet (ie. quantum)

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