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by solarkraft 2107 days ago
> their code has been built on it for forever, and there's a big advantage to having your dev machines running the same architecture as your cloud production machines

Is that really so? Are remote development and emulation not sufficiently advanced yet?

Super hot paths might be x86 optimized, but how much does that really matter? I'd think at the scales of the big providers nothing matters more than performance/power use and performance/price.

2 comments

Tons of x86 code is dereferencing unaligned addresses. Those have to be fixed before porting to ARM.
This isn't applicable to 64-bit Arm at the user application level, don't worry about it.

Prior to that, unaligned memory accesses were perfectly usable on ARMv7 (and even v6) too, this was fixed a while ago.

There’s still no real justification for vendors to even offer ARM instances, and instead become more clear to keep x86 instead with the rising of remote development and emulation.