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1. SteamCMD today has an option to download content for another platform using the @sSteamCmdForcePlatformType variable. There are use-cases for running SteamCMD on a different platform than you intend to run the server on.
2. Steam adding support for delivering ARM binaries would make it a lot easier for game developers to distribute ARM server binaries. Given that ARM-based EC2 instances are a thing, and they're cheaper for the same level of performance, it is very logical that people would want ARM server binaries.
ARM is becoming more popular for server hosting, we have high core count AMD Opteron processors which are ARM based available for servers and various other options in that market.
Consumers also now have access to Microsoft SQ1 ARM products like the Surface Pro X and Apple has also begun the shift to exclusively providing ARM based products.
In the hobbyist market we have Raspberry Pi 4/400 which are very capable ARM systems with up to 8GB DDR4 clocked at 3200Mhz
Not only are these systems cheaper but they are more efficient and much more widely available than most people think (160 billion chips produced as of 2019), almost every phone/tablet is an ARM chip.
Personally, I want to be able to host games on my Raspberry Pi4 without emulation as the emulation creates too much of a performance impact.
You do realize that
A) The Apple M1 has effectively killed Steam on Mac and that all your Mac games are all going to stop working in 2-3 years once Rosetta2 is removed from future OS versions right? You do understand that ARM has functionally killed Mac as a gaming platform on steam right?
B) you do realize that the entire point of the Surface Pro X was to do what Apple is currently doing with the M1 Macs which is to utterly sandbox everything you run. This is their 5th time of trying to get Metro apps/UWP a 'thing' so they can kill of x86.
If you want that to be your 'consumer future' well you might as well uninstall steam right now and look at the android and ios app store because that's your future.
Note that even if by some magic steam wanted to make a steamcmd for ARM, you're not 'hosting' anything on it because again, nothing on Steam runs on ARM
The point of the Surface Pro X is to gather usage stats for Windows 10 on ARM, because like Apple Microsoft has recognised ARM as a valuable market opportunity.
Both AMD and Intel have even started slimming down their traditional x86 processors by removing legacy instructions and newer operating systems are having to update and remove them as well.
The reason there are no Steam apps for ARM is due to Steams current lack of support, why would any developer create an ARM version of their Steam product if it never gets delivered to that audience?
Before you decide to respond, take a moment to think, if you have nothing constructive just leave this thread.
If you don't understand what the goal of that market is, you're missing the forest for the trees. There IS NO MARKET in ARM for steam because all ARM markets are walled gardens where steam cannot exist by definition. This is like trying to sell freezers to eskimos
And again literally no. If you don't understand history you wont understand what these initiatives are for. The only reason Steam on Linux exists at all was because Microsoft was poised to make UWP and Metro apps the only things to runon Windows 8. Making steam as a platform dead. Just because UWP/Metro failed to become a realit with Windows 8, doesn't mean MS hasn't tried multiple times to make that happen. The Surface Pro X was the latest attempt at making their own walled garden
The only reason SurfacePro X and M1 exist are to destroy existing ecosystems and to sandbox everything behind their walled gardens. You want an ARM based windows and mac computers? great. your steamcmd is now utterly moot because steam wont exist on those platforms by design of the platform holders.
There is no point because everyone who runs an ARM infrastructure has walled gardens. Google Play is walled garden. iOS Store is walled garden. M1 macs are now a walled garden. Windows UWP/Metro is a walled garden. All walled gardens makes steam impossible to use as a platform. Do you see the pattern here?
You seem to be so concerned with getting what you want you don't even understand what the implications of that are. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. If you want an echo chamber make a blog. But just because you're not hearing what you want to hear doesnt mean its not 'constructive'
Steam came to Linux for a few reasons, none of those have anything to do with Apple or Microsoft. SteamOS launched 13 Dec 2013, what is SteamOS? A Debian port. What is Debian? A Linux distribution. Connect the dots...
UWP has NOTHING to do with this discussion.
There are many many reasons for Surface Pro X existing, those reasons are irrelevant to this discussion. I mentioned this device because it is an example of a large company moving to support another CPU architecture.
If Microsoft decided tomorrow to only support ARM, what then? Valve just cuts Steam off as a failed venture? No, they would put their heads down and recompile for Windows on ARM. It's a CPU architecture.
Valve stated their reasoning for not supporting new Mac versions, go read it, has nothing to do with ARM.
Where ever you keep getting this "ARM is a walled garden" conspiracy from, put it back and forget about it. One of the most popular ARM based SoCs out there is opensource, and today there are more ARM based servers available than ever before, running guess what, Linux.
"You seem to be so concerned with getting what you want you don't even understand what the implications of that are. "
The only negative implication of supporting another CPU architecture is the additional development time, ie, changing a couple of libraries as needed and ticking the "compile for ARM" box, the positives? More customers & more sales.
"Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it."
I agree, and so do AMD and Intel who are stripping out legacy instructions from their current CPU designs in order to remain competitive with ARM/RISC as ARM has now started to make a significant impact on their enterprise sales,partly by offering server grade designed that cost less to run, significant enough for Nvidia to shell out 40 billion USD to buy ARM and secure ALL of the licencing for ARM based sales.
"If you want an echo chamber make a blog"
This is a Suggestion/Idea form, I made a suggestion, you tried to shut it down with conspiracy BS.
"But just because you're not hearing what you want to hear doesnt mean its not 'constructive'"
Take a minute to think about that.
This isn't even slightly true. For one thing, consider for one moment that the xArendaine's use case is running servers on a Raspberry Pi. Linux running on ARM is very much not a "walled garden".
The other claims are also nonsense. Windows 10 on ARM isn't UWP apps only; here's a video tutorial on compiling win32 apps for ARM64 from a few years back; the tooling is probably even better now.
M1 Macs are as much of a "walled garden" as x86-64 Macs are, which is to say, not very. (Oh no! Gatekeeper won't let you run an unsigned executable that was compiled by someone else! Unless you... er, right-click on it and click "open", or if you just disable Gatekeeper system-wide).
The walled-garden-ness of a platform has literally nothing at all to do with what CPU architecture it uses. The PS5 and Xbox Series X have x86-64 chips in them, and they're "walled gardens". You could make an Android phone with an x86-64 chip in it, and Google Play on that would be just as much of a walled garden.
People are interested in making systems with ARM chips because they get better perf-per-watt than x86-64, which is great for devices which are predominantly powered by batteries, and in server environments where you want to keep your power and cooling costs down. There's no sinister conspiracy.
Have you ever heard of Ampere Altra? Yeah, server grade Arm processor, overall performance using all cores is best than almost any other processor out there because it does not thermal throttle and they doesn't need to decrease GHz in order to add more cores, just add more.
https://amperecomputing.com/altra/
I'm owner of a hosting company and almost all of our processors are Ampere Altra, because they are just better... The only platform that is on another processor is any steamCMD server, because of its lack of compatibility.
Take minecraft servers for example, using the best ryzen processor out here, we can start a minecraft server in 8 seconds, using a normal Xeon processor this takes 15-25 seconds, and the ARM processor takes 10 seconds. Ok, it is slower? Indeed, but Ryzen has 16 threads and only capable of handling 128Gb of ram, while ampere altra can have 80 cores and 512GB of ram, while its single-threaded performance is comparable to a Ryzen.
Because Ampere Processors are almost as powerful single-threaded as most Ryzen, and it can handle much more ram and cores, all this while having a lower TDP, I can offer a lower price to my clients, everyone is happy, I don't need to handle a lot of machines, and my clients have a cheap and good service.
My opinion? ARM is the future, as simple as that.
Hardware is not hardware you know?
Your arguments for your ARM-based solutions are absolutely valid... on paper. However the real world looks completely different. Depending on your applications you have other concerns than just "How many cores can fit in there?" or "How much RAM can go brr?"
Most game server applications do not profit from a buttload of cores. Apparently most modern server-client-applications are developed with an eye out for thread optimization. Also for game server applications you tend to have a lot of small data to be shipped between drives, memory and CPU. Therefore you would highly enjoy a Cache focused hardware-setup which is where your ARM-solution completely falls off the charts. Even my Desktop CPU would outlevel your ARM-solutions for game server applications.
Gameservers very rarily go beyond 64GBs of RAM anyways so the argument is completely irrelevant here. I mean the only thing I have seen so far to hit that limit even marginally was a completely bloated Minecraft server where people intended to find the limits of their server build.
Amperes are designed for power efficient distributed workload. Like setting up virtual environments for offices and schools or maybe more scientific for Big Data applications. Thats where singlecore performance and buff RAM setups start to shine. Game servers however are a completely different department with completely different needs which can never be fullfilled by ARM-based solutions in a way the state-of-the-art server hardware does
"As we look to the future and building increasingly immersive and compelling experiences for players, we are excited to use AWS Graviton3-based EC2 C7g instances. Our testing has shown they are suitable for even the most demanding latency-sensitive workloads while providing significant price performance benefits and expanding what is possible within Fortnite and any Unreal Engine-created experience.”
Mark Imbriaco, Senior Director of Engineering at Epic Games
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c7g/
Ryzen 9 5950X:
L1 Cache: 64KB/Core | 1MB total
L2 Cache: 512KB/Core | 8MB total
L3 Cache: 64MB total
i9 9900k:
L1 Cache: 64KB/Core | 512KB total
L2 Cache: 256KB/Core | 2MB total
L3 Cache: 16MB total
Ampere Altra Max 128:
L1 Cache: 64KB/Core | 8MB total
L2 Cache: 1MB/Core | 128MB total
L3 Cache: 16MB total
Game servers uses most L1 and L2, L3 is mostly useless for them, I think we have an answer just by looking at the data
Ampere : https://amperecomputing.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Altra_Max_Rev_A1_DS_v0.90_20210923.pdf
i9: https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/core-i9-9900k.c2098
ryzen: https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/ryzen-9-5950x.c2364
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"Depending on your applications you have other concerns than just "How many cores can fit in there?" or "How much RAM can go brr?""
Well, I said my concerns, and my concerns is the same as your game server provider, as I'm one... I want to have max performance out of only one machine, this give me less work and if I can manage to get the same performance doing this, I'm down for it...
As I said, Ampere Altra has the like 20% less single threaded performance than the best ryzen, and we can pack 128 of these cores, without performance loss, onto only one CPU, there is no downside on this.
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"Gameservers very rarily go beyond 64GBs of RAM anyways so the argument is completely irrelevant here."
As this is mostly true for one gaming server, this is completely wrong when it comes to shared hosting, as commonly the machines have up to 512GB of ram and pack lots of 32GB's and 64GB's servers. A single user has 64GB, but the machine has a lot more.
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"Apparently most modern server-client-applications are developed with an eye out for thread optimization."
With all the sincerity in the world, I cannot give one good example where this is true... Mostly, they are single threaded applications or just doesn't go well with too much cores, and before you say "So why 128 of them?", well, because I'm reselling them, and the user is only getting 1-8 cores max.
... that does not sound quite right.