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A comment on ARM Mac Impact on Intel. Parent comment

Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by Androider on Monday June 22, 2020 @01:03PM (#23602639)
We recently evaluated using Graviton2 over X86 for our Node.js app on AWS. There was enough friction, some native packages that didn't work out of the box, etc. and some key third party dependencies missing completely, that it wasn't worth the effort in the end even considering the savings, as we'd likely keep having these issues pop up and having to debug them remotely on Graviton.

If macOS goes ARM and there's a sizable population of developers testing and fixing these issues constantly, the math changes in favor of Graviton and it would make it a no-brainer to pick the cheaper alternative once everything "just works".

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Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by Abishek_Muthian on Monday June 22, 2020 @01:32PM (#23603051)
Unfortunately you might have witnessed the achilles heel of ARM ecosystem, where certain SW/binaries are not available yet. Most open-source code can be compiled for ARM without much hassle[1][2][3], but some might require explicit changes to port certain x86 specific instructions to ARM.

I've been shifting my work to ARM based machine for some years now, mainly to reduce power consumption. One of my current projects - A problem validation platform[4](Go) has been running nicely on a ARM server(Cavium ThunderX SoCs) on scaleway; but weirdly scaleway decided to quit on ARM servers[5] sighting hardware issues which not many of the ARM users seem to have faced. Only ARM specific issue I faced with scaleway was that the reboot required power-off.

[1]cudf: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/da3de9b188d41570f4e988ceb5...

[2]Ray: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/aa0bf2feb02aedb3b38eef203b...

[3]Apache Arrow: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/04e1326bb9bed9cecb19c2d603...

[4]needgap: https://needgap.com

[5]Scaleway ditched ARM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865925

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Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by vardump on Monday June 22, 2020 @01:10PM (#23602725)
Filing bugs against the broken packages would be a nice thing to do. Easy enough to test on a Raspberry Pi or whatever.

I have a hunch our industry will need to increasingly deal with ARM environments.

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