Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
It&#x27;s of course impossible not to respect Linus&#x27; opinion and first hand experience in this space, but doesn&#x27;t this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely <i>smartphones</i>. That&#x27;s an entire enormous segment of the industry and it&#x27;s nearly 100% (or entirely 100%?) literally develop-on-x86-deploy-on-ARM. Smartphones also fit<p>&gt;<i>&quot;This isn&#x27;t rocket science. This isn&#x27;t some made up story. This is literally what happened&quot;</i><p>right? I mean, I can see arguing that going up into the cloud is different in some ways then going down to smartphones (although the high end ones are now going to outperform plenty of old dev machines in burst power). There are certainly differences in scaling and such. But the maturity of the tech for cross development of high level software isn&#x27;t the same as it was in that era either. And if we&#x27;re talking about bottom-to-top revolutions, embedded and smartphones seem to be at a lower level and much higher volume then PCs.<p>Finally there is clearly an upcoming disruptive fusion event coming due to wearable displays. When &quot;mobile&quot; and &quot;PC&quot; gets merged, it certainly looks like ARM is in a strongly competitive position for some big players, and having more powerful stuff up the stack will matter to them as well.<p>None of which is to say he won&#x27;t be right at least in the short term, but it still is kind of odd to not even see it addressed at all, not even a handwave.