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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

#201

Post by pjmlp »

andreiw wrote: post #178
pjmlp wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course it is hypotheticals, that is what talking about alternatives is all about.

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

#202

Post by pjmlp »

saghm wrote: post #190
pjmlp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

SteamOS was supposed to be Valve's distribution.

Windows also runs on arbitrary hardware

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

#203

Post by timthorn »

scholia wrote: post #195
douche wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with almost all you say, but you couldn't AD join a Surface. If that were to have been enabled by Microsoft, my conjecture is that it would have become the tablet for business as the market was still open at that point.

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

#204

Post by pjmlp »

zbjornson wrote: post #7

Competition is great, but this also seems like a rather big setback to the goal of having multi-cloud applications, in instances where the app can only run on x86-64.

This is why using some kind of bytecode as portable binary format has been a long tradition on mainframes, almost since the early days, when it was executed via microcode.

Modern computing has just been catching up with them.

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

#205

Post by pjmlp »

MikeKusold wrote: post #40
rb808 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are fewer binary apps these days though. Java/Scala, C#/F#, JS, Python, Erlang should all be fine.

If you need a binary, Go can be cross-compiled for ARM as well.

As long as, you only use pure Go code and no syscalls.

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

#206

Post by pjmlp »

gravypod wrote: post #82
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #70

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. So depending on your workload, a 96 core 1U is going to save you a lot of U's and power. No idea how Windows Server and Azure services fall into this. Maybe they want to dump specialized tasks onto ARM instead of ch…

I cannot wait for ThumbEE to make it into the "main stream" ARM server market. Think about the huge speed boosts we could see? I don't know why Oracle/Python/Microsoft aren't pushing this harder. Having your JIT-ed code running directly on the CPU? What could be better then that?

> Having your JIT-ed code running directly on the CPU? What could be better then that?

Although it looks good, Lisp Machines, Ada Machines, Mainframes have repeatedly proven that JIT on a general purpose CPU allows for more optimizations than having it on the hardware.

Hence why mainframes like IBM i, have their JIT on the kernel, not on CPUs.

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

#207

Post by mrmondo »

Other than some of the weird licensing I've heard (by know very little) about, I love so much about ARM / RISC based systems but the one thing I find myself needing is higher single core clock speeds, not just on ARM but on x86 as well. Considering how popular and accessible interpreted languages such as Python are these days and yet how hard it is to write multithread code easily I often find processes bottlenecked by a single core, I'd love a high clock speed (3.5ghz+) dual (or more) CPU ARM setup with at least 24 physical cores and a sensible amount of L1/2 cache, but as far as I'm aware it's not really something that's readily available. Something like that would hum with modern Python / Ruby apps or even an ARM build of PostgreSQL and a modern (4.10+) kernel with NVMe storage (if that exists / makes sense for ARM) running either CentOS 7 + some trusted third party mirrors such as elrepo/epel or Fedora Server which I have not actually tried in a production environment so I can't comment on its updates stability but have found it the most reliable desktop desktop distro (excluding macOS).

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

#208

Post by Corrado »

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 remember running SQL Server on a Digital Alphaserver 1000a back in the 90's. That machine was a physical beast though I'm not sure about the actual processing speed. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was the split case with drives on one side and a huge ducted fan on the other. That was the single most coolest thing in the room. :)

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

#209

Post by douche »

scholia wrote: post #195
douche wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe I got a bad one then, but I was not real impressed with mine.

1.) Keyboard constantly flakes out and stops working - or the keyboard and touchpad works, but the touch screen stops working.

2.) Extremely limited software choices. You're stuck with whatever small subset of the garbage in the Windows Store was cross-compiled for Windows RT. Stuck with IE, no options to get Chrome or Firefox or something that works a little better.

3.) Extremely anemic performance. Mine chokes and dies trying to read email (in the godawful Metro Mail app) and browse the ticketing webapp that my company uses.

4.) Suffers the brunt of the awful Windows 8 Metro UI design changes.

5.) The operating system is effectively dead in the water, and won't be getting updates.

6.) Microsoft took a $900 million write-down on the product[1].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/business/2013/07/microsoft-takes-900...

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

#210

Post by rbanffy »

heisenbit wrote: post #94
throwaway2048 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the amount of relevant windows software that can run on ARM is a rounding error, and x86 emulation on ARM sounds completely unusable. Microsoft is very dependant on x86.

Microsoft is still very dependent on x86. But the two main platform with potential to go forward: Server and Office are now both running on ARM.

The opposite is still very much the case. 64-bit desktop processors only started selling when a version capable of running 32-bit Windows became available (and not from Intel, who was putting all their eggs on Itanium) and only took off after a 64-bit version of Windows for them was released.

Inertia is a powerful thing.

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