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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

I don't have production experience with ARM unfortunately but Raspberry Pi is huge... Linux on desktop sucks if you have any laptop or something like this, but specific hardware just like RPi, everything works for my needs. I have node.js, .net core, python and loads of software that just works for me on ARM. Let alone I have Synology with ARM processor. Making servers is a lot easier than making consumer grade laptops or desktops. I agree with Antirez, there is so much space to try out stuff on cheap ARM with RPi and other SBC it just going to roll over x86 because ARM is going to be ubiquitous with phones and SBCs. That is why x86 won with SPARC and PowerPc, it was just in more places.

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I ran Pis at home for a bunch of services and I agree it did a great job. But when you put actual loads on it the device craters because they are so under powered. This is where THE issue is going to be. To get speeds you expect out of server hardware its not just about making a 64 core ARM. Single Core ARM vs Single Core x86 has an obvious winner. So you need to make node and .net core and python and everyone else really push their limits on using multiple cores without developers knowing about it.

But that is just the first step. You then need developers who write applications on top of those languages be multi-core aware and design their applications to fully use the huge number of cores. At that point you'll loose a lot of your power efficiency because you'll need a lot more hardware running to do the same tasks. You'll also need developers who know how to think in an extremely multi-core way to get the extra performance boost.

Nah bro I just hand it to my paas and the magical unicorn make it work awesomely quick and faster then competition dollar for dollar eye roll

Well, servers typically care about throughput and not latency. So if your ARM server will process 10000 requests per second with each request taking 100 ms and your x64 server will process 8000 requests per second with each request taking 80 ms for the same price, ARM will be preferred. There are exceptions, of course, but generally server workload is an ideal case for multi-threaded applications, because each request is isolated. That's why server CPU's usually have a lot of cores but their frequency is pretty low.

Why are you declaring winners when you're comparing RPis to full powered x86 CPUs?

RPis are built to a price and don't have the best CPUs that ARM can offer. A better comparison would be Apple's A chips.

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