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Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

Is it? FAFAIK, the only places where ARM servers run is inside Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, and they design their own processors for that. The reason they chose ARM has to do with licensing, it has little to do with the characteristics of the processor architecture nor with processor performance.

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AWS and other cloud providers are major, major, major buyers. They have a lot of influence in the CPU market.

ARM is cheaper and the performance hit is smaller than the savings. For scalable workloads you can easily just run more ARM and save money. Also, a lot (lot) of workloads are memory or I/O bound so the performance hit is negligible. ARM has gotten pretty optimized in both the CPU architecture and the tooling thanks to mobile uses.

Is ARM cheaper? A few weeks ago I needed a small VM in the Google Cloud and the smallest ARM machine cost the same as the smallest x86 machine.

It's not cheaper for you, it's cheaper for them.

On AWS it’s like a 20-30% discount - effectively free money for services like RDS, ElastiCache, and often Lambda or even ECS where the effort is either minimal or extremely low.

I am not nearly as knowledgeable as many of the commenters here on the hardware, but I do have first hand experiences running ARM on production at scale.

What AWS offers and what Google offers are not even close: on AWS, our workloads actually perform better (as in, higher QPS/core, resulting in fewer pods/instances), in addition to being more cost effective (both in terms of per-instance price to begging with, and less instances in total, due to aforementioned higher QPS/core serving same amount of total requests). For the limited ARM offer from Google we tested, the performance is worse than equivalent x86 instances, in addition to no price incentives.

This isn't my area of expertise, I'm sure others on here can rattle off more names, but at the very least Oracle has ARM servers available (the free ones are decent for hobby stuff) and Hetzner has ARM servers available

Microsoft is using Ampere chips and Ampere has some other clients like Oracle, Hetzner etc. you can use their servers inhouse too.

> with the characteristics of the processor architecture nor with processor performance.

Why did AMD introduce Genoa and Intel is developing equivalent products too? There is market for CPUs with a very high number of low-powers cores and it seems ARM had an advantage there. Even now the price per core (which are good enough for many applications) for Ampere/Gravitron cores is significantly lower.

Hetzner also has ARM servers you can order. Also on GCS: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/arm-on-compu...

Exactly. The year of the ARM server has been predicted for more than 10 years. (Only topped by the year of the Linux desktop, but the latter has probably just been a joke most of the time anyway.)

The year of the linux desktop has been such a long prevailing joke that when the Linux desktop took over the education market nobody paid attention and people keep making YOTLD jokes.

I think about this from time to time. The Linux desktop is actually here in huge sectors of the market and no one cares. They displaced Apple in education due to expense and Apple finally hitting escape velocity (and thus can price their goods at whatever they want), so you see a ton of Ubuntu/Mint/etc desktop cheap machines in schools that run web browsers and OpenOffice (but mostly the former).

It's pretty funny.

ARM server has a niche. If Gravitron/Ampere is good enough for your use case and you care about cost they seem like a good deal. AMD/Intel are trying to directly compete with them now with Genoa and Sapphire Rapids.

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