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Comment by sdan | Hacker News Reader

This is great news. Except that a ton of software doesn't support ARM.

When I was trying to shift all my current infrastructure onto a couple of RPI's, many of the Docker containers didn't support ARM (qeumu and buildx aren't reliable) and other software didn't support ARM either.

Unless there's a good way to go from AMD to ARM, I'm not entirely sure how great Graviton or other competitors will get.

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Back in the late 90’s and early 00’s, there were a ton of cpu platforms around: SGI MIPS, DEC Alpha’s, Intel, Sun SPARC, etc... while I will admit it was a colossal pain working somewhere that had all of those, it was often possible to recompile from source to get things to run. I’m not suggesting it’s trivial, but given the incredible investment in ARM in the mobile space, the wind is at least at your back today. It certainly has got to be much easier than it was in the days of being the only person in the world trying to recompile an obscure open source scientific computing package for DEC Alpha. Commercial software is a different beast, but even there, the incentive will be high to do a port if lots of people start migrating to this.

Windows NT 4 supported x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. Yikes.

All have eight bit bytes with 2's complement, same availible word sizes and float formats (with some complexity on the Alpha due to VAX compat). C code will mostly not care beyond endianness. The PDP is the strange one.

But also, a ton of it already does or can be made to do it, e.g. look at what various distros already have in their ARM variants. Sure, it's not quite as off-the-shelf yet (e.g. because people making random docker containers don't bother yet to build an ARM variant too), but the investment needed isn't that big in many cases, so if those servers offer a compelling reason for you, it can easily be worth it.

Assuming Amazon intend to upstream their work.

All the testing of open source stack Amazon uses internally will support ARM. That is all of their Hosted Open Sources offering. This will kickstart all software support. AWS ARM offers cost advantage which proprietary software now has an incentives or their customer will request ARM support.

All these will create a positive feedback loop into the ecosystem.

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