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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

#211

Post by pjc50 »

trome wrote: post #155
justin66 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good point, but their repos are so eccentric because Debian refused to support the RPi's older ARM architecture and the RPi community had to roll their own. That speaks to the original point of this subthread, I believe. Not only does Linux not offer the "exact same experience across the board," it cannot even do it for the ARM architecture. For decent enough reasons, really, when you think about it.

Only a select few boards were based on ARMv6, the Raspi 2 and above use a modern ARMv7 core. Running Raspbian vs Debian on a Raspi 2 or 3 shows off the massive performance gap between the two, IMO they should have used a single ARMv7 core from the get go. But the Raspberry Pi is a fundamentally flawed platform, with poor I/O, binary blobs required to make the hardware function, and a community that is toxic towards f…

> community that is toxic towards free software

I think that's a hostile mischaracterisation of the community!

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

#212

Post by willemmali »

reitanqild wrote: post #95
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…

linux as a primary gaming platform works just fine for me, thanks to valve. Confirmed by a happy occasional CS:GO player here.

I wish it worked on Debian, it used to but the last time I tried I lost a day and still didn't get it to run...

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

#213

Post by kartickv »

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…

So if my code is parallel enough to take advantage of all the cores, like a web server serving 96 requests simultaneously, one per core, would I get better performance than Intel? Better performance per watt?

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

#214

Post by kartickv »

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?

Why did CHRP fail?

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

#215

Post by dozzie »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #104
gravypod wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 96 core 1U server is going to bear a high price The server market only cares about price/watt and size. 1U is very small for such a parallel system, no need to write your code for Phis or anything like that, and low power in comparison to Intel. Win, win, and win.

Does the market care much about size? I thought there were lots of datacenters that reached their limits on power and cooling despite having floor space available for more racks.

> Does the market care much about size?

If it didn't, we wouldn't have blade servers, for which the main selling point is density.

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

#216

Post by james_a_craig »

cjhanks wrote: post #199

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 (flo…

To cut a long story short: Yes, most applications can just be ported.

The number of applications that rely on the actual clock rate being steady is extremely close to zero. Bear in mind nearly everything runs fine on laptop machines, which generally have a much wider range of clock states, and have no problems.

Similarly, each core in modern machines is likely to be running at a different speed, and again, no problems.

Finally, the clock rates used are a matter of OS policy; if you tell your OS to keep the CPU at a particular speed, it'll do it, regardless of whether it's an x86 or an ARM CPU.

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

#217

Post by dahauns »

smileysteve wrote: post #187
nomel wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What is this, the 90s? No one cares about RISC vs CISC or ARM vs. x86-64 (on a high-level ISA level) anymore. It's all in the implementation.

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

#218

Post by nickpeterson »

james_a_craig wrote: post #216
cjhanks wrote: post #199

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 (flo…

To cut a long story short: Yes, most applications can just be ported. The number of applications that rely on the actual clock rate being steady is extremely close to zero. Bear in mind nearly everything runs fine on laptop machines, which generally have a much wider range of clock states, and have no problems. Similarly, each core in modern machines is likely to be running at a different speed, and again, no problem…

I'm struck by how hard it would be to track down a bug that depends on the consistency of the clockrate...

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

#219

Post by rrdharan »

Qwertious wrote: post #184
zitterbewegung wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 versio…

You mean Debian Stable, though perhaps that was intentional? If so, well done.

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

#220

Post by cmrdporcupine »

kartickv wrote: post #214
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?

Why did CHRP fail?

Because it wasn't Intel, it was PowerPC, and Intel always manages to pull a rabbit out of the hat in terms of performance and price.

Also if I recall I don't think Windows NT for PowerPC ever truly saw the light of day. And this was while Windows 95/98 was still dominant and before Windows 2000/XP, so there wasn't really consumer software for it. So no real operating systems.

PowerPC ended up being a dead end which only Apple pursued. Though I guess there were variants that ended up in gaming consoles for a while.

At a job I had (IBM subsidiary) in 1997 they had a pile of early-CHRP boxes hanging around. For kicks I got Linux running on them, just out of curiosity. They were basically juts PCs (PCI bus, etc.) that ran with a PowerPC CPU. Which is effectively what Macs were for years, too.

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