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Comment by lopkeny12ko | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the hype around ARM64 in the server space. Is this just due to all the marketing from Apple around their proprietary M processors leaking into the enterprise market?

The latest Xeon and EPYC offerings are very performance competitive, I doubt we need to overhaul and entire processor ISA paradigm for continued improvements.

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It's probably pretty rare (though maybe increasing) to have a workload that is ARM-only, so it really comes down to price performance. Amazon claims 40% better price/performance on Gravition2 vs. comparable x86. While it varies by workload, for scenarios where this plays out and the architecture isn't important (languages increasingly make multi-arch deployment easy) this (and S3 intelligent tiering) are the closest thing to free money I can think of.

The hype is because Intel and AMD have an enforced duopoly of x86, because only they own the licenses to x86-64 and you'll take it from their cold dead hands.

So, if you want to compete, you'll have to go ARM. Amazon graviton and Apples M series have only made it more appealing.

The main reason to switch is cost.

They own the licenses to SSE3/SSE4/AVX. For now.

Currently anyone can make an x86-64 processor.

The ARM server hype was 10 years ago. Every Linux distro wanted to be first, but then they all waited for the year of the ARM server.

Nice to see that things seem to start moving a bit now. Energy consumption and cooling are major concerns for data centers. ARM is just so much better when it comes to energy consumption. So the potential should be there.

> Is this just due to all the marketing from Apple around their proprietary M processors leaking into the enterprise market?

That doesn't seem likely, as the release of AWS Graviton based instances predates the Apple M1 release by about two years

It's really just a matter of time at this point. X86 is a bloated nightmare that is a pain to deal with and has a rich history of vulnerabilities where the patches typically affect performance.

With Arm Graviton on AWS, for our specific environments and workloads, we get better performance for less money. Same goes for the hosts, who pay a smaller upfront investment per core and less in electricity per core. Bigger bang for the buck when the glove fits.

Same here, generally 10-40% better performance, depending on workload, at 15%+ lower costs, on AWS.

We have seen performance improvements in PHP, Java, and various CPU-bound tasks such as video transcoding.

This goes for either EC2 m7g vs m6i and also for Fargate x64 (from my experience, perfomance seems comparable to m5 instances) vs ARM (Graviton2).

I use an M1 Mac, and I'd prefer to develop and deploy on the same CPU architecture. For M1 users the x86 is an alien cross-compilation target.

For me at least, if I knew I was getting same performance for less energy I’d actually be willing to pay a bit more. Data centers are big polluters still. I think we likely can get to nearly 100% renewables in the non-distant future, and lower energy per compute unit is part of that.

> For me at least, if I knew I was getting same performance for less energy I’d actually be willing to pay a bit more.

Well if they're spending less to power my ARM machine, then they should damn well be charging me less to host it.

That's the best, and only, long term path towards more efficient compute.

Interesting parallel is I have an electric car, which I pay more for and has limitations. But for me I think the societal benefit is great enough I’ll eat the cost. So if it gets data centers to invest in energy savings because they pocket the difference I’m ok with it.

> But for me I think the societal benefit is great enough I’ll eat the cost.

I don't mind eating the cost to save the planet if there is a cost.

What I am objecting to is businesses making a larger profit off people who want to save the planet.

They're literally taking your goodwill and turning it into profit. If they aren't interested in saving the planet, then why are you giving them money, instead of giving it to their competitors?

I guess the question is, why not pay less to save the planet? Your extra money doesn't go towards saving the planet, it goes towards making you feel like you're saving the planet.

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