3 ms·

Thanks to Android, there's probably an order of magnitude more ARM Linux kernels running out there than AMD64 Linux kernels.

laumars 7y ago
I doubt that. At least not "an order of magnitude more". Bare in mind AMD64 is used heavily in servers where Linux also dominates. Even in cloud providers, most of their services will be Linux under the hood.
- ajdlinux 7y ago
  As someone who works for a server manufacturer I very much know how dominant both AMD64 and Linux are. But there's literally billions of Android phones out there.
  - laumars 7y ago
    The world population is "only" 7 billion so also doubt there's "literally billions" of Android phones out there once you discount iPhone users, non-smart phone users (eg many elderly), young kids, and people too poor to own a phone (homeless, people in developing countries, etc). You might get more favourable figures if you also count old and unused Android handsets but then you'd have to do the same for Linux servers as well -- and Linux servers have been around a lot longer than Android phones have. AWS alone had 1.3 million active servers in 2016 alone - most of which would have ran Linux. AWS has grown massively since then (averaging at around 40% year on year) so that figure has certainly raised significantly since then. Plus AWS might be the largest player in town but it's not the only one, so you'd have to include GCP, Azure, Oracle, OVH, Digital Ocean, etc. Not to mention all the literally thousands of other hosting providers out there. Then you have on-prem gear in schools, offices, shops, home labs, etc....and we've no way of estimating all the deprecated instances over the last 2 decades (longer to be frank, but lets round down for simplicities sake). Where as Android is 11 years old and took a little while to gain momentum...? Even if you only talk about tech in active use, people only need 1 phone (or maybe 2 if you have a separate work and personal phone). That one phone isn't automatically an Android and, as mentioned in my opening paragraph, a great many people don't even have phones to begin with. But lets just focus on those who do...each of those people will interact with more than one service. You'd interact with point of sale systems which would need a server backend. You'd interact either hundreds of online endpoints a day just browsing the web; and many of those endpoints would have a multitude of servers backing them. Not to mention online endpoints for games, mobile apps, etc. People's daily lives revolve around 1 or 2 phones but require so many more servers for all of that connectivity to work. So I just don't see how Linux phones outnumber Linux servers by an order of magnitude. I think your estimations there are way off. Also, being someone who "works for a server manufacturer" doesn't give your opinion here any more credibility. More than 90% of the people on here (myself included) could make similar arguments for authority. In fact I'd be more surprised if I was chatting someone who hadn't any professional experience in either servers nor mobile phones.
    - jlgaddis 7y ago
      > ... also doubt there's "literally billions" of Android phones out there ... > AWS alone had 1.3 million active servers in 2016 alone ... According to a quick Google search: In 2018, Samsung (alone) sold ~295 million phones [0]. In 4Q18, there were ~3 million servers sold (across all vendors) [1]. > Even if you only talk about tech in active use, people only need 1 phone ... Here, between two of us, the girlfriend and myself, we've got at least seven Apple devices that I can think of. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that there are other households just like ours but with Android devices instead. --- ETA: FWIW, a few months ago, Stephanie Cuthbertson, Android product manager, stated [2]: > “Today there are over 2.5 billion active Android devices.” --- [0]: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-02-21-gartner-says-global-smartphone-sales-stalled-in-the-fourth-quart https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-02-2... [1]: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44905719 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44905719 [2]: https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/07/android-passes-2-5-billion-monthly-active-devices/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/07/android-passes-2-5-billio...
      - laumars 7y ago
        Interesting stats. thank you for taking the time to research this. I do still have a few potential discrepancies however: * Not all Android devices are ARM. However it's fair to say the x86 builds of Android are the exception so unlikely to affect the figures in any meaningful way * Cuthbertson's figure is a sales pitch and hasn't been independently verified. Companies often inflate their figures to sound good (like when Apple included MacBook sales as part of their iPhone and iPad figures). Cuthbertson's figures do seem high (based on the napkin maths I presented earlier but also how Android has been growing faster than the growth of the population and smart phone market), so I'd be interested to know what Cuthbertson defines as "active". If someone upgrades their phone and sticks the old one in the draw, is it still classed as "active" for 1 month? 3 months? 12 months? Is it ever deprecated from the "active" list even though it's technically not in use any longer? If that's the case, we are back to my earlier point that deprecated Linux servers should also be in scope. * Lastly not all Linux servers are sold as servers. There's quite a few examples of this: 1) Some of the larger hosting providers are known to build their own servers, 2) Some smaller or medium sized companies are known to buy second hand hardware for on-prem gear 3) ditto regarding hobbyists and home labs 4) It's not uncommon for desktops to be provisioned as makeshift Linux servers when requirements don't demand a rack-mountable enterprise solution 5) Also Linux doesn't have to be running bare-metal to be running an AMD64 kernel. There's plenty of instances of virtual machines in the world. Getting accurate figures of running Linux VPSs et al would prove impossible 6) Not all Linux AMD64 instances will be traditional servers. eg Elemental build their own Linux-based machines for transcoding. These wont be off the shell servers either. Then you have all manor of other black boxes out there from set top boxes, networking hardware, etc. Many of which wouldn't be AMD64 but many also will 7) Lets also not forget desktop Linux :) Once you account for all of these edge cases I think non-AMD64/Android and AMD64/Linux become a lot more comparable. So I'd still be very surprised if non-AMD64/Android does outnumber AMD64/Linux by an order of magnitude. Ultimately this an impossible argument to prove either way. However I think we do all agree on the overall point that both Android and Linux (in the more general sense) are hugely successful these days -- irrespective of their success relative to each other.

laumars 7y ago

I doubt that. At least not "an order of magnitude more". Bare in mind AMD64 is used heavily in servers where Linux also dominates. Even in cloud providers, most of their services will be Linux under the hood.

ajdlinux 7y ago
As someone who works for a server manufacturer I very much know how dominant both AMD64 and Linux are. But there's literally billions of Android phones out there.
- laumars 7y ago
  The world population is "only" 7 billion so also doubt there's "literally billions" of Android phones out there once you discount iPhone users, non-smart phone users (eg many elderly), young kids, and people too poor to own a phone (homeless, people in developing countries, etc). You might get more favourable figures if you also count old and unused Android handsets but then you'd have to do the same for Linux servers as well -- and Linux servers have been around a lot longer than Android phones have. AWS alone had 1.3 million active servers in 2016 alone - most of which would have ran Linux. AWS has grown massively since then (averaging at around 40% year on year) so that figure has certainly raised significantly since then. Plus AWS might be the largest player in town but it's not the only one, so you'd have to include GCP, Azure, Oracle, OVH, Digital Ocean, etc. Not to mention all the literally thousands of other hosting providers out there. Then you have on-prem gear in schools, offices, shops, home labs, etc....and we've no way of estimating all the deprecated instances over the last 2 decades (longer to be frank, but lets round down for simplicities sake). Where as Android is 11 years old and took a little while to gain momentum...? Even if you only talk about tech in active use, people only need 1 phone (or maybe 2 if you have a separate work and personal phone). That one phone isn't automatically an Android and, as mentioned in my opening paragraph, a great many people don't even have phones to begin with. But lets just focus on those who do...each of those people will interact with more than one service. You'd interact with point of sale systems which would need a server backend. You'd interact either hundreds of online endpoints a day just browsing the web; and many of those endpoints would have a multitude of servers backing them. Not to mention online endpoints for games, mobile apps, etc. People's daily lives revolve around 1 or 2 phones but require so many more servers for all of that connectivity to work. So I just don't see how Linux phones outnumber Linux servers by an order of magnitude. I think your estimations there are way off. Also, being someone who "works for a server manufacturer" doesn't give your opinion here any more credibility. More than 90% of the people on here (myself included) could make similar arguments for authority. In fact I'd be more surprised if I was chatting someone who hadn't any professional experience in either servers nor mobile phones.
  - jlgaddis 7y ago
    > ... also doubt there's "literally billions" of Android phones out there ... > AWS alone had 1.3 million active servers in 2016 alone ... According to a quick Google search: In 2018, Samsung (alone) sold ~295 million phones [0]. In 4Q18, there were ~3 million servers sold (across all vendors) [1]. > Even if you only talk about tech in active use, people only need 1 phone ... Here, between two of us, the girlfriend and myself, we've got at least seven Apple devices that I can think of. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that there are other households just like ours but with Android devices instead. --- ETA: FWIW, a few months ago, Stephanie Cuthbertson, Android product manager, stated [2]: > “Today there are over 2.5 billion active Android devices.” --- [0]: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-02-21-gartner-says-global-smartphone-sales-stalled-in-the-fourth-quart https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-02-2... [1]: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44905719 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44905719 [2]: https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/07/android-passes-2-5-billion-monthly-active-devices/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/07/android-passes-2-5-billio...
    - laumars 7y ago
      Interesting stats. thank you for taking the time to research this. I do still have a few potential discrepancies however: * Not all Android devices are ARM. However it's fair to say the x86 builds of Android are the exception so unlikely to affect the figures in any meaningful way * Cuthbertson's figure is a sales pitch and hasn't been independently verified. Companies often inflate their figures to sound good (like when Apple included MacBook sales as part of their iPhone and iPad figures). Cuthbertson's figures do seem high (based on the napkin maths I presented earlier but also how Android has been growing faster than the growth of the population and smart phone market), so I'd be interested to know what Cuthbertson defines as "active". If someone upgrades their phone and sticks the old one in the draw, is it still classed as "active" for 1 month? 3 months? 12 months? Is it ever deprecated from the "active" list even though it's technically not in use any longer? If that's the case, we are back to my earlier point that deprecated Linux servers should also be in scope. * Lastly not all Linux servers are sold as servers. There's quite a few examples of this: 1) Some of the larger hosting providers are known to build their own servers, 2) Some smaller or medium sized companies are known to buy second hand hardware for on-prem gear 3) ditto regarding hobbyists and home labs 4) It's not uncommon for desktops to be provisioned as makeshift Linux servers when requirements don't demand a rack-mountable enterprise solution 5) Also Linux doesn't have to be running bare-metal to be running an AMD64 kernel. There's plenty of instances of virtual machines in the world. Getting accurate figures of running Linux VPSs et al would prove impossible 6) Not all Linux AMD64 instances will be traditional servers. eg Elemental build their own Linux-based machines for transcoding. These wont be off the shell servers either. Then you have all manor of other black boxes out there from set top boxes, networking hardware, etc. Many of which wouldn't be AMD64 but many also will 7) Lets also not forget desktop Linux :) Once you account for all of these edge cases I think non-AMD64/Android and AMD64/Linux become a lot more comparable. So I'd still be very surprised if non-AMD64/Android does outnumber AMD64/Linux by an order of magnitude. Ultimately this an impossible argument to prove either way. However I think we do all agree on the overall point that both Android and Linux (in the more general sense) are hugely successful these days -- irrespective of their success relative to each other.