Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
Considering that Apple won't sell their chips to anybody else, and the M2, M3, Mn could be increasingly faster than the x86 chips, how long before we start moving along this path?<p>1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice.<p>2. There will be N somewhat compatible ARM chips, that is to say they are somewhat incompatible. Remember the home computing landscape of the 80s / early 90s but also the diversity in server architectures and OSes.<p>3. At least Microsoft is likely to sell their chips to third parties (they used to sell their software). Probably Amazon and Google have reasons to sell their chips too (Google -> Chromebooks)<p>4. Some of those chips will end up in development laptops and desktops.<p>5. If you want to develop for AWS you'll be safer to have a laptop with an Amazon chip, if you want to develop for Google Cloud a Google Chip, for Azure a Microsoft chip. This is not unheard of because if you want to develop for iOS you must have Apple hardware since 10+ years ago.<p>6. The chip manufacturer that wins the war for the developers' machines wins the war for the cloud, because it won't be possible for (let's say) Google to compete with (let's say) Amazon if Google has to buy chips from Amazon because 90% of the developers have a laptop with an Amazon chip.<p>Or we'll end up with 5 different laptops (unlikely) or one that connects to a remote desktop running in the appropriate cloud with the correct chip. That laptop could be a Mac or anything else, something powerful or a thin client.<p>So: fragmentation and then remote desktops? Back to mainframe / time sharing?