Are there any plans to bring ARM machines to Fly.io, as some major cloud operators are doing?
In my experience, multi-core processing on ARM machines is not as good as what people have been saying in recent years, but it can be quite good in terms of cost and electrical efficiency when used for simpler processing, for example.
I personally hope you all consider more budget and earth friendly plans!
I remember in another thread @kurt mentioned the difficulty of supplying servers, but I don’t think that’s a problem now.
In fact, HPE recently released servers with Ampere Computing ARM processors from the ProLiant series Gen 11.
Hi!
ARM isn’t on our roadmap - this may change in the future but it’s not something we’re actively looking at.
AFAIK most ARM server CPUs are custom made by Google, AWS, and Microsoft for their own servers.
Qualcomm is releasing an ARM chip for desktop machines so maybe that will arrive to servers at some point.
Honestly my hunch is we will see widespread adoption of RISC-V instead for data centers.
It’s a bit sad, but can we solve it by going with the dedicated host announced a while ago?
It’s true that major providers are going to do their own research and development instead of buying chips. But Equinix Metal and others have been able to use Ampere computing chips for more than 3 years. Besides Equinix Metal, it has already been adopted by cloud providers such as Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Its advantage is its electrical efficiency, but it has another advantage: it’s single-threaded and has a constant clock speed, so it’s easy to predict performance.
I don’t think the future of RISC-V is bad, but to be honest, it’s still more than a few years away. We still have a lot of work to do compared to ARM. ARM gained some citizenship because of Apple’s aggressive push to install their own chips, and by the time RISC-V gains some citizenship, all the ARM servers we have installed will be at the end-of-life.
Yeah it’s not going to happen soon, but tbh I think it has more chances to be adopted as the default option than ARM.
There’s a lot of dev work involved in getting our stack to run on ARM unfortunately. It’s not quite as simple as just getting some ARM servers and installing a bunch of packages 
It would definitely be a cool thing to support at some point but I think it’ll be a while unless there’s significant interest.
Fair enough!
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