Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
I think the most important question here isn’t whether Arm will win servers.<p>The assumption would be there, that the cloud market will continue to grow at its current rate and continue to be the valuable market it has been.<p>What scares intel most is that a new market will emerge for middle and high power compute spread more broadly, and this market will grow explosively faster than data center ever did.<p>The question is whether these new cores will bring about a new way of structuring the data center, where it is decentralized and spread out more instead of stuck in one building.<p>A good example is the infrastructure that must go into place to support 5G and self driving cars. Every lamppost will have a server on it.<p>Arm winning servers becomes irrelevant in that world. If fog / Edge / infrastructure combo blow up the way mobile did, Intel’s little data center slice won’t matter.<p>Developers will only adapt when there is a big new market to write software for. Data center by itself not sufficient to motivate the change needed.