[jackcodes]

It’s slightly tangential, but I’m managing an engineering team of 28-30 and we’re currently considering a wholesale change to ARM CPUs across the board.

MacBooks are our de facto development laptop and all our services use skaffold for local development, Docker basically. If we consider the perhaps likely outcome that MacBooks will one day be ARM-only, that Docker will not offer cross-arch emulation, and that our development environment will be ARM only, it then becomes likely that we’ll migrate our UAT and PROD to ARM based instances.

If we go that route it’ll mean more money to the AWS Graviton programme and likely further development of ARM chips. I can’t see this affecting RISC-V but the M1 switch could very well benefit the wider ARM ecosystem.

[thawaway1837]

I don’t get this.

You’re basically locking yourself to a single development eco system, and a highly limited deployment eco system.

It’s not clear what the benefits of either are either. I get that the MacBook gets great performance for battery life but the majority of work is gonna be done in desktop settings, so simply using more/equally powerful x86 chips is only gonna cost you a few dollars a developer per year in electricity costs.

And all that despite the fact that your development is on Docker which doesn’t even have a working solution for the workflow you’re considering at the moment.

[jackcodes]

It‘s currently in consideration and by the time we’re ready to make a call on it, Docker will be too. They almost are in fact.

But consider that we may be optimising for different things. Most new developers I hire can be thrown a MacBook and they’ll know what to do, Linux on the other hand doesn’t have that guarantee especially towards the junior and front-end market segments of where I work. It’s a (real) broad strokes opinion, but I’m of the belief that macOS and by extension MacBooks offer us fewer overheads in terms of setup, maintenance, onboarding, tooling suitability for the median developer. So that leaves us using macOS.

This is the factor we’re optimising for more than deployment portability - we optimise for vendor lock-in in less than the developer experience for the median of our developers. For many of us on this forum we may be best with Linux on a bleeding edge distro, but for our preferences we deploy MacBooks for portability. Whether it helps things overall, this is in Manila where a net monthly salary is often less than the cost of a laptop, so we deploy one device that can be transported between home and work as required for those that don’t have a personal device.

With that, I see this as Apple locking us into that ecosystem rather than a choice we’re making on our side, so I’d rather lean into this and explore it further than doing nothing. If it comes out positive then we’ll be ready to make the switch before Apple forces us into it, and if not we’ll deploy something thinkpad-esque and keep our production instances x86.

[simonh]

M1 performance is about much more than just battery life, it’s screaming fast is raw execution power as well. In single core it’s even competitive with Ryzen for goodness sake. That’s just mental.

I don’t see this as a significant lock in risk. It’s not like Apple are the only company selling ARM laptops and desktops, and it seems clear Google, Microsoft and Amazon among others are serious about ARM.

[trimbo]

99.9999..% of servers in the world run x64.

x64 virtual machines, Docker, etc have to be supported on Apple's M chips for a long time to come. There's zero risk of this changing soon unless Apple wants to scuttle the non-iOS/non-Mac developer market for Mac.

M1 is a cool chip, but there's no reason for an average development company to rush into it unless targeting M1 MacOS specifically. Maybe the server world swings to ARM, but that will take decades to sort out, if it actually happens at all.

[tybit]

AWS have thrown their weight behind ARM server side and are really ramping it up for internal and customer usage.

x64 is still going strong but the competition has massively heated up over the past few years.

[sharpneli]

It took about 10 years for x86 to go to zero marketshare in servers into 80%+ in the 90's. Similar change in HPC market etc. So based on history the transition time is around 10 years, not tens of years.

[CyberDildonics]

That would mean 1 out of every million servers is not x64, which seems hyperbolic when amazon is making ARM servers and power chips are still out there.

[zapita]

Doesn’t Docker already support cross-arch emulation?

[jackcodes]

Cross-arch images are supported, but you can only virtualise the arch you’re on. No running x86 on ARM for example.

Edit; see replies, I got this wrong