Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by kijiki » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 1:01 AM UTC

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 Translating.

Basically a JIT that recompiles (for example) 32bit x86 instructions to ARM64, so that you can run old apps on new CPUs.

DEC had FX!32 to run x86 Windows NT programs on Alpha Windows NT.

Apple licensed Transitive's QuickTransit to run PPC OSX apps on x86 Macs, though in typical Apple style they renamed it "Rosetta".

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

#182

Post by nomel » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 1:24 AM UTC

andreiw wrote: post #119

nomel wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Firs…

> HW-wise we are now in the 3rd gen of chips

I stand corrected. It's been a time since I've looked at the performance. I didn't realize they caught up so quickly.

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

#183

Post by shmerl » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 1:58 AM UTC

I'm more interested in new AMD processors in the server. That's going to be interesting.

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

#184

Post by Qwertious » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 2:25 AM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #174

nacs wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

IIRC that benchmark is garbage, because the compiler they use was so old that Debian Stale had a newer version in their repos, when that article was first published.

Ah, here it is. From https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/3snvpc/steamo...

"took a quick peek at the latest Geekbench executable for Linux(3.3.2,) it was compiled with GCC 4.4.3 on Ubuntu 10.04 - a 5 and a half year old compiler. Windows version was compiled with MSVC 2012 update 4 released 2 years ago."

Take note: That ars article was done ~15 months ago (november 2015). In it, they used Ubuntu 10.04, which was released in April of 2010 (thus '10.04')! Steam wasn't even released on Linux, until nearly 3 years later, in 2013!

That article is so BS that you should ignore it outright. It's not even fit to be toilet paper.

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

#185

Post by ams6110 » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 3:06 AM UTC

Twirrim wrote: post #96

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…

Dell did this for ages with AMD chips. Same time every year you'd see an article go across all the magazines about Dell planning to introduce AMD chips to their servers, and just as quickly vanish once Dell had finished negotiating with Intel.

They did more than plan, I have a rack full of older Dell servers with AMD CPUs.

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

#186

Post by brutus1213 » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 3:33 AM UTC

Dumb question. Are there commodity ARM SOCs with built-in PCIe controller logic? Or is the idea that you have a separate controller chip? Is PCIe used in ARM systems or do they use a different bus - axi??? Sorry for the dumb questions. Hardware hobbyist here :)

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

#187

Post by smileysteve » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 3:45 AM UTC

nomel wrote: post #108

vvanders wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty par for the course in a lot of HW companies(esp SoC selection). Where it gets tricky is when you've pulled that move a couple times and then it turns out AMD/ARM/etc actually have the good chips. At that point you've burned the other company so many times by changing at the last minute that it becomes hard to get real support and engagement where you actually need it.

> actually have the good chips. Has that ever been the case yet, for ARM servers? There's no "magic" in ARM. The reduced power comes from the reduced complexity. Heck, branch prediction is fairly new in ARM. I have trouble seeing a time when an Intel chip will ever fall behind even a bucket full of ARM chips, unless workloads ever fall near zero.

The magic in arm is in Risc. in an azure (or aws) cloud where 90% of operations are webserver events, those are less than complex operations. Relational databases with sums, grouping, etc. Not using every bit of x86. And once you start talking about geospatial, advanced searching, and cryptography, you might just offload to a graphics chip.

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

#188

Post by loeg » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 3:48 AM UTC

andreiw wrote: post #140

loeg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're far too wimpy today.

Which chips are you refering to, specifically? Because otherwise it's a blanket statement that is simply untrue.

> Which chips are you refering to, specifically?

Literally any ARM chip. What ARM chip do you think makes a fitting replacement for a high performance Intel core in a Macbook?

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

#189

Post by scholia » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 3:53 AM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #136

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?

Imagine having a time machine, going back to Microsoft in the 90's and telling them to forget SGI, IBM, and HP, port NT to ARM...

While you're there, tell Intel to ignore HP and forget Itanium ;-)

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

#190

Post by saghm » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 3:58 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #117

bisby wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, but Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo also make their entire systems (both hardware and software), not to mention that they don't provide games for other platforms, so it's obviously going to be a little different for SteamOS, which is essentially a second-tier platform from Valve and is running on arbitrary hardware.