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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

#171

Post by vardump »

gravypod wrote: post #123
cat199 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an expert, since your statement triggered a goog .. but : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Thumb_Executi... Says: "On 23 November 2011, ARM Holdings deprecated any use of the ThumbEE instruction set,[77] and ARMv8 removes support for ThumbEE."

DARN! That's too bad! That would have been really cool. I know that there are a few in-hardware JVM systems that are used in cellphones that could be made use of. That would be cool.

Well, except that it would have been slower... that's why it got removed.

Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance

#172

Post by faragon »

Jabbles wrote: post #138
imglorp wrote: post #35

This could well be a negotiating strategy to rejigger the relationship with Intel. Dell did exactly the same thing a number of times for similar reasons. So all you do is: put out some press releases, ramp up some hires, put out some glossy product roadmaps. Intel starts to get separation anxiety and flinches: well, maybe they can afford to come closer to AMD prices for another year. They kiss up and you back out of…

Perhaps spurred by Google's recent announcement that they have Skylake chips in their cloud: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/Google-Cloud-Pl...

Sure. And also, may be the Google-Inte Skylake comes from past year, when Google was testing POWER9 chips... [1]

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/07/open_power_summit_p...

Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance

#173

Post by breischl »

tgragnato wrote: post #160
foobiekr wrote: post #112

Has 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?

I suddenly feel too young

Fear not, that's a problem that will solve itself eventually.

Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance

#174

Post by zitterbewegung »

nacs wrote: post #76
zitterbewegung wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-s... Compared to windows .

Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance

#175

Post by rbanffy »

acdha wrote: post #101
flamedoge wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they translating asm to C?

No: NT was written in a portable high level language from the beginning. They had a few platform support ASM blocks but one of the big selling points in the 90s was true API compatibility across x86, PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, etc. In the pre-Linux era that was huge – porting across vendors' different conceptions of Unix was a huge time-sink. DEC built an impressive x86 to Alpha dynamic binary translator but that was thei…

In the end, the lack of software (on Windows, the vendor would need to recompile the code for all ISAs) was what doomed Windows on PPC for me. Even though it was ridiculously fast, and a nicer experience than MacOS 8, neither Visual Studio nor Outlook were there.

Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance

#176

Post by wcfields »

freehunter wrote: post #126
toyg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the other hand, their A10 chip is roughly on par with the performance of the Intel chip they include in the 12" MacBook. They're not going to replace an i7 with an A10, but maybe replace the M3 or M5 with an A10, replace the i5 with an A11, and shoot for the i7 with an A12 or A13. Why else would they dump so much money into making the fastest ARM chip on the market? The iPhone doesn't need that much power, but the…

I've been speculating that they'll do a A11+x86 combo; possibly using a very underpowered, bargain basement x86 paired to an ARM for native binary compatibility during the transition.

Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance

#177

Post by cududa »

ptrptr wrote: post #111

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 is releasing a version of Windows client (not to be confused with server, which was todays announcement) for ARM with an x86 compatibility layer.

Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance

#178

Post by andreiw »

pjmlp wrote: post #165
andreiw wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it wouldn't. Sometimes I wonder if IA-64 was just an exercise in killing of Alpha and HP-PA... Anyway, x64 succeeded because instead of producing something no one asked for, and poorly (IA-64), AMD went to Microsoft, found out what they wanted from a 64-bit chip, and built that .

Sure it would. If Intel had transitioned their processor line to IA64, without AMD to defy their roadmap, do you really believe consumer desktops would magically start using other vendor processors? > AMD went to Microsoft, found out what they wanted from a 64-bit chip, and built that. Because they still had the cross-license deal with Intel that allowed them to legally build x86 clones. No x86 licenses, no x64.

We're talking complete hypotethicals. When x64 was introduced, not only weren't there any consumer Itanium chips, but they weren't even hypothetical.

Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance

#179

Post by foobiekr »

rleigh wrote: post #59
justin66 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As long as the non-x86 architecture is both 64 bit and little endian, I think this is true. However, in the absence of those two properties not at all. There are many mainstream linux code bases which are either inconsistently endian-clean (meaning they are for some operations but not all) or are straight up broken. This becomes really visible debugging bizarre, impossible bugs on BE architectures.

Re: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance

#180

Post by andreiw »

milcron wrote: post #152
andreiw wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. When multiarch mattered (NT 3 and 4), Microsoft was the only vendor that delivered the exact same OS, device support and development environment across x86, Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC, and pushed the industry towards standardization. Microsoft has always taken arch and platform independence seriously, and this was evident even in 2010 when I worked on NT. You could rebuild the whole system for any supported ar…

BTing?

Binary translation / JIT. Like Apple did with Rosetta or like DEC did on Alpha NT with FX!32.
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