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Comment by nordsieck | Hacker News Reader

> If Amazon prices them well below their Intel and AMD instance types, they could really drive adoption and lock-in.

Adoption? Sure.

Lock-in? Umm...

Most servers run Linux, and most software on Linux is distributed as source. The same reason that people can easily move to ARM - they can just recompile/download software for the correct architecture and everything mostly works - is the same reason they can leave easily.

All the other AWS proprietary APIs: sure. It'd take a stupendous amount of work for Netflix to migrate away from AWS. But running on ARM isn't really part of that.

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> Most servers run Linux, and most software on Linux is distributed as source.

Being distributed as source code does not mean the source code is not architecture-specific. A lot of software has SIMD-optimized code paths, and it's common for these SIMD code paths to target SSE2 as the least common denominator (since AMD included SSE2 as part of the baseline of its 64-bit evolution of Intel's 32-bit architecture, every 64-bit AMD or Intel CPU on the market will have at least SSE2), so they have to be ported to NEON. And that's before considering things like JIT or FFI code.

> and most software on Linux is distributed as source

Clearly you aren't purchasing much software. If you're one of the (majority of) large software companies that use precompiled binaries from vendors for any of the components in your systems, you're at the mercy of which architectures your vendor(s) support.

How many of those "precompiled binaries" are truly performance critical? If it's just a single component, you can run it in qemu-user mode and still come out ahead overall.

How many of those precompiled binaries are performance critical? How about all?

From the software that runs for hours to compile a model, the software that calculates results, to the interactive analysis software that needs to load GBs of data.

The whole reason to run these things on a server farm is that you need large and fast machines that are better shared to make sure they get optimal use of the machine and of the license pool.

Is this the archetypal AWS customer that drives the majority of intel’s sales to AMZN? That not only has lock-in with a closed source vendor, but that vendor is not agile enough to give ARM binaries for AWS workloads? Doubtful IMO. Maybe for EDA and CAD/CAM setups, but somehow I doubt those are enough to keep Intel as we know them afloat. Intel has huge reason to fear ARM on the server.

I was thinking about server farms in general, not AWS specifically. You’re probably right that AWS-type server are more likely to skew towards software that is available in source form.

A commercial EDA tool was one of the use cases benchmarked in the source article.

Yeah exactly, you're not going to skimp on the CPU by choosing ARM to save $500 a year when you have software that costs you thousands every single year. You're going to stick with x86_64 instead of the crappy budget option that doesn't even run your software.

Twist: enterprise software goes the way of IBM mainframes, with a small number of large customers paying crazy prices for compliance and customization, and everything in the hardware/software stack being 10+x more expensive than its commodity equivalent.

Not every corporation has proprietary x86 binaries they need to run on a server. Every company I have worked at has had entirely open source server software and a few proprietary javascript libraries.

Does anyone run proprietary software in a cloud context?

The whole point is that the hardware becomes as flexible as the software, spin up, spin down, blow it away and deploy a fresh instance if something goes wrong.

I can't see many people trying to do that with proprietary licensing?

Absolutely. You can even get the license and support contract costs built into the instance’s hourly rate. RHEL, Oracle DB, Windows Server, and SQL Server are all offered this way.

All the software on the Linux server farm of my company that truly matters for my job is extremely expensive proprietary binary-only software.

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