Re: Have we become too Intel x64 centered?

From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2021-01-24 23:11:29

On 24/01/2021 20:25, René Ferdinand Rivera Morell wrote:

>     It was composed by me from multiple sources, including personal
>     experience of programming GA and submitting pull requests for AP-based
>     CI open source projects.
> 
> What Niall failed to mention is that the ARM architectures are not for 
> Microsoft hosted agents.

I didn't actually know that Microsoft weren't exposing their ARM64 Azure 
VMs to the public yet, sorry.

I was also confused by some having wired in AWS Graviton2 instances as 
self hosted Azure agents as a stand in. That's expensive unless you're 
already spending on AWS, alternatives include:

- OVH will do you a fully dedicated dual core ARM Cortex A9 @ 1 Ghz with 
2Gb of RAM for €60/year, if you can snag one available. Note that 
emulation on a fast x64 is not especially slower than this CPU.

- Ikoula will do you a fully dedicated quad core Raspberry Pi 4 @ 1.5 
Ghz with 4Gb of RAM for €60/year. Not much storage however.

- Mythic Beasts will do you a fully dedicated quad core Raspberry Pi 4 @ 
1.5 Ghz with 4Gb of RAM for £72.50/year + £2/10Gb/year of storage.

- You can colocate your own RaspPi at https://raspberry-hosting.com/en 
for €36/year. You could easily build a high end model for under €100 
complete with fast USB3 connected SSD.

I have no connection with any of the above providers. I have no 
experience with any of the above providers, except the OVH Cortex A9 
which I rented for a while for a job I had to do at the time many years 
ago. It worked well enough, though it was slow relative even to an Intel 
Atom.

Niall