Thread by @ErrataRob

On Hacker News is this article saying there will never be an "ARM desktop computer". It's probably right, but not for the reasons it claims.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=220143…

It's the same reason that Apple could never penetrate the smart phone market in 2007 that was dominated by Nokia and Blackberry. Everyone new the future of that market was smart messengers like Blackberry's with an integrated keyboard.

And they were right.

Apple didn't compete in that market. Apple competed in a new market they created, with phones with no keyboards at all, replaced instead with screens that covered the front, with multitouch, pinch-and-zoom, full internet browsing, and apps.

The same is true of the desktop market. Trying to replicate the desktop with ARM and Linux is foolish. It's not going to happen. But that market is stagnant. The future is other markets were ARM and Linux are well positioned to dominate.

Same with servers. The market for ARM servers is going to go nowhere. By this, I mean the market where vendors like Dell and HP sell servers to customers.

But the largest customers of cloud computing servers don't buy from Dell or HP, but instead build their own. Every large tech companies builds their own servers. It's getting to the point where every large tech company is also building their own CPU.

Building your own microarchitecture is difficult. Instead, you license that microarchitecture from ARM (like the Cortex A72 or Cortex A76) and combine with other IP on a chip, and have TSMC or some other foundry build the chip.

Thus, in the future, we'll have ARM servers everywhere. But it's not because ARM somehow competed with Intel in the server market. Instead, it's because the market was redefined.

In hi-tech, you never win by re-fighting the battles in legacy markets. You win by defining a new market for the future.