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Comment by BlueTankEngine | Hacker News Reader

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> It proves my point beautifully when the only response to my comment

Your comment was beyond ignorant, and wrong. Most folks here are too smart, or busy, to reply to such nonsense. I am neither.

ARM is by far the most shipped and used arch every year. AMZ is even going in heavier on it. It's not legacy tech at all. So a person decided to show you how wrong you were, by listing what's probably the most impressive chip in all of our lifetimes, and it's guess what, ARM.

> Obviously I was referring to Linux/Windows workstations

The creator of Linux is using an ARM machine as a workstation today, AFAIK.

> if everyone was smart enough to pick up on that I wouldn't be paid as much as I am

If you're making more than a burger flipper at Wendy's, the world just isn't fair.

The one viable server ARM CPU core is now tied up in a Qualcomm-ARM legal spat and probably won't see the light of day and made it pretty clear to anyone not grandfathered in like Apple that it's not worth designing your own ARM core. ARM itself has been hemorrhaging employees both because of better offers from Apple and the RISC-V stealths, and because since the SoftBank push to get their money back has simply been a worse and worse place to work. Their ability to execute is extremely compromised.

Because if the long tail of the hardware industry, the writing can be on the wall long before it's clear based on what you can go out and buy off a shelf today.

I get it that you want RISC-V to succeed - so do I - and to advocate for it but I really don’t understand why it needs this sort of comment about Arm. I see exaggerated criticism of the Arm ISA elsewhere from people who ought to know better too - it’s really CISC, it’s 5000 pages vs 2 for RISC-V etc. It’s just not necessary.

I mean, nothing I said is exaggerated here. ARM doesn't even have a viable server core that can compete with x86 even as vaporware. SoftBank ruins everything they touch, and is super focused at the moment on stealing from Peter to pay Paul to get something out of the upcoming ARM IPO since their attempt to sell it off to Nvidia fell through. The rumor is they've been cutting R&D funding hard to get temporarily boost profitability. If anything this is more a dig at how vulture capitalism ruins productive companies.

As an aside, ARM has always been a hybrid CISC/RISC core. It has nothing to do with the number of instructions, but the fact that not having an I$ on the ARM1 forced it to have microcoded instructions to mainly to support LDM/STM. That's not a dig at ARM. It's a valid design; particularly at that gate count.

You jumped in in support of a comment that said Arm is ‘legacy’ tech. You said they don’t ‘even have a viable server core’. They are ‘haemorrhaging’ staff. Softbank have ‘ruined’ them.

Sounds more apocalyptic than exaggerated tbh.

I still don’t know why you think this is necessary.

I guess I don't see why you think it's necessary to not criticize them.

The unwritten rule of HN: You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet.

ssshhhhhh, the Rust Evangelism Squad will hear you.

The M1/M2 Macs run Linux pretty well. It's not perfect yet, but perfectly usable (especially as a desktop machine!) and support is improving every day.

I believe you're trying to move goalposts to avoid admitting you're wrong.

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