Maybe the interesting part of the smartphone ARM story is the degree to which Apple has used custom silicon to optimize speed and power for their own specific workloads and software.
Why couldn't ARM-based servers do the same thing? I understand why a generic ARM-based CPU might not win against a generic ARM-based x86 CPU at running cross-compiled code in Linux. But what if the server has a custom ARM-based chip that is a component of a toolchain that is optimized for that code, all the way down to the processor?
Imagine a cloud service where instead of selecting a Linux distro for your application servers, you select cloud server images based on what type of code you're running--which, behind the scenes, are handing off (all or part of) the workload to optimized silicon.
I don't have the technical chops to detail how this would work. But I think my understanding of Apple's chip success is correct: that they customize their silicon for the specific hardware and software they plan to sell. They can do that because they own the entire stack.
I think if any company is going to do that in the server space, it would have to be the big cloud owners. No one else would have the scale to afford the investment and realize the gains, and control of the full stack from hardware to software to networking. And sure, enough, that is who are embarking on custom chip projects:
So, maybe the result won't be simply "ARM beats x86," but rather "a forest of custom-purpose silicon designs collectively beat x86, and ARM helped grow the forest."
Why couldn't ARM-based servers do the same thing? I understand why a generic ARM-based CPU might not win against a generic ARM-based x86 CPU at running cross-compiled code in Linux. But what if the server has a custom ARM-based chip that is a component of a toolchain that is optimized for that code, all the way down to the processor?
Imagine a cloud service where instead of selecting a Linux distro for your application servers, you select cloud server images based on what type of code you're running--which, behind the scenes, are handing off (all or part of) the workload to optimized silicon.
I don't have the technical chops to detail how this would work. But I think my understanding of Apple's chip success is correct: that they customize their silicon for the specific hardware and software they plan to sell. They can do that because they own the entire stack.
I think if any company is going to do that in the server space, it would have to be the big cloud owners. No one else would have the scale to afford the investment and realize the gains, and control of the full stack from hardware to software to networking. And sure, enough, that is who are embarking on custom chip projects:
https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/why-tech-giants-are-design...
So, maybe the result won't be simply "ARM beats x86," but rather "a forest of custom-purpose silicon designs collectively beat x86, and ARM helped grow the forest."