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The funny thing is that roughly a decade ago AMD literally was prototyping an ARM CPU presumably for server use. I recall hearing about 2014 - AMD Opteron A110

The funny thing is that roughly a decade ago AMD literally was prototyping an ARM CPU presumably for server use. I recall hearing about 2014 - AMD Opteron A1100: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.anandtech.com/show/8362/amds-big-bet-on-arm-powered-servers-a1100-revealed https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.anandtech.com/show/... The startup Calxeda (2008-2013) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calxeda https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calxeda Intel also had the 'xscale' ARM chips back in the late 2000s

acdha 3y ago
I don’t want to say it’s all the iPhone but I do think it’s not a coincidence that things are very different now that we have robust tools like Clang and over a decade of compatibility patches throughout the open source world. In 2008 even Java developers tended to be antsy about running on non-x86 hardware. A decade later it’s close to a non-issue for a staggering amount of stuff.
- seltzered_ 3y ago
  I'm not a backend expert, but I'd also speculate abother big change was containerization becoming popular - Docker came out in 2013.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Definitely - both for making it easy to manage isolated services independently and for forcing everything to have a known build process.
throwawaylinux 3y ago
x86 lock-in benefits AMD greatly, just as it does Intel. It is my belief that they started looking at ARM cores when they thought they would never be able to be competitive with Intel in x86 (pre-Zen was a bad time for AMD). And when it became clear that actually their new cores would do very well against Intel, they dropped ARM plans. They don't want to move off x86 if they don't have to. Intel Xscale were a different beast. They got that through StrongARM from DEC as part of some law suit wheeling and dealing. They never seemed to really want to push it, preferring instead to try competing in mobile with a string of failed x86 cores.

acdha 3y ago

I don’t want to say it’s all the iPhone but I do think it’s not a coincidence that things are very different now that we have robust tools like Clang and over a decade of compatibility patches throughout the open source world. In 2008 even Java developers tended to be antsy about running on non-x86 hardware. A decade later it’s close to a non-issue for a staggering amount of stuff.

seltzered_ 3y ago
I'm not a backend expert, but I'd also speculate abother big change was containerization becoming popular - Docker came out in 2013.
- acdha 3y ago
  Definitely - both for making it easy to manage isolated services independently and for forcing everything to have a known build process.

throwawaylinux 3y ago

x86 lock-in benefits AMD greatly, just as it does Intel. It is my belief that they started looking at ARM cores when they thought they would never be able to be competitive with Intel in x86 (pre-Zen was a bad time for AMD). And when it became clear that actually their new cores would do very well against Intel, they dropped ARM plans. They don't want to move off x86 if they don't have to. Intel Xscale were a different beast. They got that through StrongARM from DEC as part of some law suit wheeling and dealing. They never seemed to really want to push it, preferring instead to try competing in mobile with a string of failed x86 cores.