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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

#101

Post by acdha »

flamedoge wrote: post #89
rbanffy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 their work, not part of NT.

See https://web.archive.org/web/20020503172231/http://www.win200... for more history from that era

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

#102

Post by throwawayish »

rleigh wrote: post #81
RandomOpinion wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Potentially capable; their support for non-x86 has always fallen short. " Microsoft will continue to provide mainstream support for Itanium-based systems until July 2013, and extended support until July 2018. " -- http://www.computerworld.com/article/2516742/computer-hardwa... Itanium came out in 2001 and the above article is from 2010, so that would be about 9 years of product releases and 17 years of support over…

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.

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

#103

Post by sp332 »

robert_foss wrote: post #27
shliachtx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure is one of the big three in cloud computing - Google, Amazon, and Microsoft

Sure, but it is a single cloud. Will you ever be able to buy these products? And would you ever want to? Windows Server 20XX on ARMv8 will forever remain a niche platform at best.

Their new datacenter is a mile long. It would be profitable to sell chips just for the one datacenter.

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

#104

Post by erik_seaberg »

gravypod wrote: post #84
gonzo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure, but you can pick up a 1U server running 96 ARM cores today. ARM cores are optimized for certain types of work and have code to accelerate all sorts of things like AES, SHA1/2, video codecs, etc. True, but that 96 core 1U server is going to bear a high price, and Intel CPUs also have instructions to accelerate AES, SHA1/2, video codecs, etc.

> 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.

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

#105

Post by sjellis »

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…

Google have been doing something with POWER CPUs for a few years now, at least on an experimental basis.

2016, Power 9:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3052951/cloud-computing...

2014, Power 8:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2149080/google-shows-homegrow...

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

#106

Post by anonymfus »

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…

Wine tests are a bad way to compare performance because you can not be sure that all features that the game uses are actually implemented and not stubbed.

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

#107

Post by r00fus »

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.

The resulting Intel Payola sometimes carrying Dell's quarters - preventing Dell from missing profitability.

https://www.velocityreviews.com/threads/intel-and-dell-scum-...

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

#108

Post by nomel »

vvanders wrote: post #49
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…

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.

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

#109

Post by nomel »

mtgx wrote: post #50
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…

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.

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

#110

Post by rleigh »

throwawayish wrote: post #102
rleigh wrote: post #81

Earlier 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.

Yes, but none of this thread is about this specific platform and its merits, it's about the different strategies for supporting multiple platforms, and where Microsoft through the choices they made failed to realise their own full potential on non-x86 platforms while other organisations managed to fully support them.
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