61–70 of 239 posts
> We wouldn't even bring something to a conference if we didn't think this was a committed project and something that's part of our road map." As anyone who rode the rollercoaster of abandonment in the ActiveX years recalls, their previous MO was all about things that became uncommitted after being in their road map :( I really hope there's some kind of future for non-Intel players.
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Ah, just like governments threaten to use Linux to rejigger MS.
I've heard similar theories about SteamOS. That it was a threat to Microsoft since they had just released their own store on Windows 8 that competed with Steam. I'm inclined to believe it since Valve seems to not care about it much anymore.
Since MS is mostly "behaving" themselves, Valve is keeping SteamOS around, but not focusing on it.
At least for now... (it wouldn't surprise me if MS became more aggressive in their W10+DX12+"Xbox everywhere"+"MS Store" push...)
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Not quite. They've been working together for a few years to do this. Qualcomm even based its motherboard design off of Microsoft's Project Olympus. > QDT has been working with Microsoft for several years on ARM-based server enablement and has onsite engineering at Microsoft to collaboratively optimize a version of Windows Server, for Microsoft’s internal use in its data centers, on Qualcomm Centriq 2400-based systems…
Why doesn't apple move macbooks to ARM processors?
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On the same motherboards? That's rather impressive, if the same motherboard can support two different chip architectures. Having an ARM chip that just happens to use an AM3/AM4 socket is less impressive.
I'm purely a layman in this space, but I don't see why it would be impossible. Pretty much all modern CPUs are actually SoCs. Modern peripheral connections like PCIe and USB 3 have direct access to the CPU rather than going through custom bridge chips, simplifying board design and making it possible to use the same board for two architectures. Audio and network chipsets don't care what architecture the CPU uses. Agai…
The hard part is wrangling the software: BIOS, drivers, testing and more testing, patches, microcode updates. Finding out that your wifi chip vendor has moved the chip to end-of-life just before you were ready to ship would be a non-issue if the software part were faster.
For what? Microsoft is not really a dominant force in the server space.
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ActiveX deserved abandonment, but anyone who remembers those years probably also remembers that Microsoft is capable of supporting NT on many different architectures.
Potentially capable; their support for non-x86 has always fallen short. If you look at e.g. Linux or BSD distributions, the entire world is rebuilt for every architecture. Running Linux on powerpc, arm, amd64, I get the exact same experience across the board as x86 bar platform-specific bits like openfirmware/efi tools. Microsoft has never done this. The vast majority of their stuff remains x86 only, making arm and e…
This is demonstrably not true, there are plenty of ports that end up being Intel-only, and plenty of architectures that involve some sacrifice in terms of software choice if you want to run them. (as a SPARC and Raspberry Pi user I could elaborate, but hopefully you get the idea) Not that there's anything wrong with that.
> Until Microsoft start building and providing every binary as a native build, and providing the tooling for others to do the same, they will remain wedded to x86, and I'll be unable to take their support for other platforms seriously.
What you take seriously is your business, but the standard you're holding Microsoft to is one Linux doesn't meet, let alone BSD, and it's completely arbitrary regardless. If their ARM platform does what it needs to do, it doesn't especially matter if it offers support for (for example) legacy Windows cruft.
Why though? ARM server chips haven't beat Intel just yet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite. They've been working together for a few years to do this. Qualcomm even based its motherboard design off of Microsoft's Project Olympus. > QDT has been working with Microsoft for several years on ARM-based server enablement and has onsite engineering at Microsoft to collaboratively optimize a version of Windows Server, for Microsoft’s internal use in its data centers, on Qualcomm Centriq 2400-based systems…
Why doesn't apple move macbooks to ARM processors?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard similar theories about SteamOS. That it was a threat to Microsoft since they had just released their own store on Windows 8 that competed with Steam. I'm inclined to believe it since Valve seems to not care about it much anymore.
If I remember correctly, Valve from the start considered SteamOS as "backup", a way to escape Windows if MS pull some shenanigan they don't like. Since MS is mostly "behaving" themselves, Valve is keeping SteamOS around, but not focusing on it. At least for now... (it wouldn't surprise me if MS became more aggressive in their W10+DX12+"Xbox everywhere"+"MS Store" push...)
Why though? ARM server chips haven't beat Intel just yet.
So depending on your workload, a 96 core 1U is going to save you a lot of U's and power. No idea how Windows Server and Azure services fall into this. Maybe they want to dump specialized tasks onto ARM instead of churning through their x86 infrastructure which takes longer and uses more power.
Data centers are power bound. Power is expensive and instantly turns into heat, which requires yet more power to exhaust and cool. Anything that can bring significant power savings will be taken seriously in data centers. If ARM servers can deliver these power savings, then its a no-brainer to buy them. The cost of porting Exchange, SQL server, Sharepoint, IIS, and Windows Server to ARM is going to be a fraction of the power bill those DC's run. Now that MS is actually paying the server bills, they're realizing that pegging your product to just x86 isn't the wisest move.