Question - is this a sign of maturity of ARM architecture? Can we really expect desktop OS to move to ARM? Could Apple start transitioning Apple AX into their laptops?
Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance
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Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance
#112Has it been long enough for people to forget NT on Alpha, MIPS and x86 (and i860, though not released)? And to forget both PReP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_Reference_Platform) and CHRP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Plat...) which were going to break the Intel stranglehold once and for all?
Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance
#113Question - is this a sign of maturity of ARM architecture? Can we really expect desktop OS to move to ARM? Could Apple start transitioning Apple AX into their laptops?
Servers and desktops have very different requirements, just ask the linux guys. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I don't see that happening for another 5 years at least. Apple in particular is already getting a lot of flak for underpowering laptops, switching to Arm now would basically kill the entirety of their remaining high-end offering on desktop.
Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course, which is sort of the point: ARM is way behind with Linux packaging and distribution. Every vendor has their little tarball of junk that runs on their SoC or device or whatever. There's no architecture-unified distro you can install on everything. And this is where it gets hurt, because while Raspberry Pi can get away with handing out tarballs, no one is going to bet a datacenter install on anything other t…
Debian and Ubuntu have had ARM ports for years. Prospective server vendors will need to address the driver situation but once you've booted the userland is highly portable.
Fedora has too, I believe. But that's sort of missing the point. Userspace ports got done years ago because they're the easy part. The hard part is the system integration that you sweep away as a "driver situation" to be dealt with by "vendors".
And so far there's no significant entry here for the ARM world. So you can't roll up a server install or Docker container that isn't, fundamentally, a hacked up tarball from some random vendor. And the market doesn't trust that.
Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're quite far behind Apple when it comes to perf. Aren't Apple's ARM chips in their iPad pro competitive with lower end modern x86_64 chips?
Is that not also true for the Snapdragon chips? (835 for example)
No, not really. Apple's advantage is quite staggering.
Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other issue for consumers is that SteamOs will give you a ~10% performance hit .
> SteamOs will give you a ~10% performance hit Any sources to back up this claim? 10% performance hit compared to what? Windows? A different Linux distro? I've found that for native games, Linux can actually offer better performance in many cases than the Windows version. Someone also did a test recently (full video on Youtube) with the Windows version of the new Doom running on Linux through the WINE emulation (yes…
My personal anecdotal evidence is that many of the games available for Linux on steam are really terrible ports. Gang beasts for example couldn't even find the binary. Once I fixed that, I was lucky to get 5 fps with lowest settings on my 6 core i7 with a Titan x. Yes I had the latest Nvidia drivers. Chivalry medieval warfare was another unplayable performance offender.
This isn't necessarily valve's fault though. It's because the devs will shit out a Linux build without even trying to run it or they just don't care.
Some games work great. Some don't work at all and shouldn't even be listed with Linux support.
I sincerely hope Linux takes off as a viable gaming platform. All the tools and components are there. The only thing missing at the moment is developer mindshare.
Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...)
a ton of major issues have been recently fixed. It doesn't seem to be on the back burner at all, it's just that building/updating an entire OS is a bit different from building/updating just steam. Also, a lot of fixes are edge cases that most people don't view as fixes, because it was never an issue for them. Most of the issue revolves around GPU drivers, which in theory valve is not responsible for, but they have hi…
> Even then, most devs don't optimize for OpenGL. That's again on the dev, and not valve,
Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, specially Microsoft, go the extra mile to make sure games perform well on their platforms, even special casing APIs for specific games.
Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Debian and Ubuntu have had ARM ports for years. Prospective server vendors will need to address the driver situation but once you've booted the userland is highly portable.
Fedora has too, I believe. But that's sort of missing the point. Userspace ports got done years ago because they're the easy part. The hard part is the system integration that you sweep away as a "driver situation" to be dealt with by "vendors". And so far there's no significant entry here for the ARM world. So you can't roll up a server install or Docker container that isn't, fundamentally, a hacked up tarball from…
The post I was replying to was explicitly talking about distributions, packaging, etc. I wasn't saying that there are no problems but disagreeing with the assertion that the problem is higher-level rather than lower level.
As for sweeping anything away, it's true that there's work involved but it's not like we're starting from scratch in 1985. There's a lot of industry experience supporting new hardware and any company serious enough to be bidding on a Microsoft order for a boatload of Azure servers isn't going to walk away because they can't figure out how to package up some drivers.
Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance
#119Earlier 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…
We're talking about servers here, which has nothing to do with the OS. If ARM chips were appropriate, we would see them in Linux, but time and time again, the power to performance just doesn't make sense for ARM, when compared to an Intel chip, for reasonable workloads.
Time and time? We do see them in Linux.
The ARM server ecosystem has been in the works for a few years. TechCon'16 we saw the announcement that the software is fully there: and this is not hype, all major distributions support all the major players out of the box. Download ISO, install, and use it.
HW-wise we are now in the 3rd gen of chips (QC Centriq, XGene3, ThunderX2) all of which compare with E5, not Atoms. First/Second gen were mostly proving grounds for the specs and software work, excepting for Cavium machines, which have some serious network I/O where the relative wimpyness of any one of the 96 cores simply doesn't matter for certain workloads. In a matter of two years we've seen private datacenters soak up XGene2 and Cavium chips. We've seen ODMs and OEMs get their shit together and start selling real kit (b2b.gigabyte.com).
It's funny, people expect these things to suddenly appear overnight everywhere and competitive with E7s and Power9. It takes decades, but the server guys managed to fit in nicely in about 5 years. I am excited.
Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not referring to that type of support; this is merely support for the base platform. I'm referring to the entire ecosystem of Microsoft products, of which you'll find most are x86 only. When you say "there's no money to be made...so Micosoft has no reason to bother", this attitude is a major reason why ia64 failed, and why their previous arm attempt failed, and why their current arm attempt is also likely to fail…
IA64 failed because it was a bad answer to a question no one asked. AMD got it right, that's why AMD64 won.
AMD managed to produce x64 thanks to the licenses they had from Intel, otherwise this laptop would be powered by an IA64 processor.