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

bloomberg.com

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

#191

Post by trapperkeeper79 »

kijiki wrote: post #181
milcron wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Is this the same as code morphing mentioned here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver

Article seems to say NVidia couldn't get a license from Intel.

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

#192

Post by scholia »

hollerith wrote: post #47
gigatexal wrote: post #45

This is awesome: with a renewed AMD and now ARM gaining another big proponent (Apple being the first imo) there might finally be some real competition to Intel's place at the top.

Samsung and Qualcomm aren't big proponents of ARM?

They are, but ARM probably wouldn't exist in its current form without Apple.

ARM was developed in the 1980s by Acorn -- a small, mostly struggling British company -- as the Acorn Risc Machine. They wanted a simple 6502 replacement without going to the Motorola 68000, as Apple, Atari, Amiga (Commodore), Sinclair and others did.

Apple wanted to use the ARM in the Newton handheld, but wasn't going to bet on a chip owned by a small British company.

So, Apple persuaded Acorn to spin off the ARM operation into a separate company, Advanced Risc Machines. This was jointly owned by Acorn, Apple and VTI (40/40/20). The rest is history.

VTI got in because Acorn relied on its software tools to design the ARM chip and get it manufactured. Acorn had never designed a chip before and, in the beginning, didn't really know what it was doing.

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

#193

Post by foobiekr »

kijiki wrote: post #181
milcron wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I worked with those guys on a project - also PPC to x86. It was pretty amazing and they were solid. Sad that so much of it ended up at IBM.

Apple's marketing around it was amazing; you'd think Apple built the technology in house.

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

#194

Post by scholia »

andreiw wrote: post #143
rleigh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Great points. It is an odd fact that Microsoft generally avoided writing operating systems on or for Intel x86 processors [1], and started the development of both NT and CE on Risc processors.

Meanwhile, Linus had a PC with an Intel 386 processor, so that's what he started Linux on and for...

[1] MS DOS was based on code that Microsoft bought in, not having time to develop it from scratch. However, Microsoft did have some success on x86 with its PC version of Unix, which was called Xenix.

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

#195

Post by scholia »

douche wrote: post #39
kerhackernews wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that Microsoft can how ship Surface devices with ARM chips that can occasionally run x86 applications when needed. And it also allows Microsoft to ditch Intel if they really wanted to.

Hopefully they get it right this time. The last ARM Surfaces (Surface RTs) were hot garbage, barely functional enough to do email and a little web browsing on.

Actually they were better than that. Users loved them (check out the star ratings on user reviews) and some are still in use.

The design was fundamentally flawed for other reasons, but they performed reasonably well compared to rival tablets, while also offering multiple log-ons, multi-tasking and full Microsoft Office, which those other tablets lacked. They also supported Active Directory, ditto.

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

#196

Post by scholia »

rbanffy wrote: post #20
mtgx wrote: post #19

Payback time? https://semiaccurate.com/2016/11/17/intel-preferentially-off... Okay, obviously this partnership started years back, but it's nice to see that not everyone is willing to encourage Intel's monopoly, as Google often does (in Chromebooks, too, even though Intel's chips are virtually unnecessary there). Although, to be fair, the "Wintel" name didn't come out of nowhere. Microsoft obviously played its part i…

Microsoft tried as much as it could to avoid being locked into Intel. They built Windows NT to be multi-platform and, at a given time, it ran on MIPS, PPC, Alpha and a later version on Itanium. Intel has been much more dependent on Microsoft's monopoly than the contrary.

> Microsoft tried as much as it could to avoid being locked into Intel.

... while Intel kept looking at Linux and anything else that might help it avoid being locked into Microsoft ;-)

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

#198

Post by protomok »

brutus1213 wrote: post #186

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 :)

Yes, many ARM based SOCs include PCIE IP...SOCs from Freescale, TI, Nvidia, etc. typically supporting PCIE RC and EP.

Lots of boards with ARM based SOCs are using PCIE WiFi/BT combo chips which traditionally used SDIO. PCIE also being used for storage.

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

#199

Post by cjhanks »

I am far from an expert on this... but. For most software, can ARM realistically replace Intel? If we ignore the obvious advantages of the intrinsic instructions found in most Intel chips...

Intel has a really solid and reliable clock speed with a relatively small number of steady states (low power, turbo, default). In my limited experience, ARM chips seem to have variable clock speeds depending on both the type (floating point/integer) and magnitude (number of cycles/sec) load. Is this only apparent in the IoT space? Does it disappear in ARM chips designed for servers? Am I delusional about this?

It is really difficult to understand just how sensitive any given application is to the monotonic clock. Can most applications really just be ported?

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

#200

Post by TwoBit »

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.

That might change with AMD's new chips.
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