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Comment by lallysingh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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