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[OT] What's the future of x86? Seems like ARM for servers has taken over in so many places and continues to grow at the expense of x86

• dboreham 3y ago
  Not really. ARM servers are quite hard to find (e.g. none at Digitalocean), and ARM builds of common software projects are often missing. The server world overwhelmingly still runs on X86.
  • johnklos 3y ago
    For some of us, compiling from source is the ONLY way to do things. If there's a zero day, I'm not going to sit around waiting for someone else to make a binary. Likewise, simply as a matter of principle, I won't run software that won't seamlessly compile on non-x86 architectures. It's much better that way in the long run. I run ARM, and I have yet to find anything that won't compile on it, unlike, say, UltraSPARC, PowerPC or Alpha, for which edge cases aren't exceptionally rare.
    • tester756 3y ago
      >For some of us, compiling from source is the ONLY way to do things. If there's a zero day, I'm not going to sit around waiting for someone else to make a binary. Usually binaries are available at the very similar moment the fix is published
      • johnklos 3y ago
        Sure, but sometimes they're not. Those sometimes can be very, very critical. Think of the Red Hat (and others) local privilege escalation, for example: Red Hat released a CVE with vague language and with no clear steps to take. If you ran a server that had lots of users, some of whom might be mischievous, you'd be pissed, because you'd be wondering what the heck to do before one of your mischievous users did something.
  • doublepg23 3y ago
    I mean this seems to be rapidly changing. A lot of the AWS guys I know are learning on their ARM instances. A few even run them in prod.
  • robotnikman 3y ago
    And a lot of ARM hardware is still not supported off the bat in mainline linux.