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

#231

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 6:17 PM UTC

bisby wrote: post #228

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.

they also push those platforms as their only game platform. and try to discourage devs from using other platforms. Valve isnt trying to discourage devs from using windows. Windows is still their main income source. Linux only devs aren't going to make valve money during the transition to windows. The goal is to build the game library on linux so it is a valid competitor. Also, they can't really make a ton of special…

It is not only a matter of special OS level APIs.

When one attends GDC, they have booths were they give support directly to customers, they also fly-in to relevant studios to sort out any kind of performance or bug related problems they might be facing.

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

#232

Post by bisby » Thu, Mar 09, 2017, 6:50 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #231

bisby wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they also push those platforms as their only game platform. and try to discourage devs from using other platforms. Valve isnt trying to discourage devs from using windows. Windows is still their main income source. Linux only devs aren't going to make valve money during the transition to windows. The goal is to build the game library on linux so it is a valid competitor. Also, they can't really make a ton of special…

It is not only a matter of special OS level APIs. When one attends GDC, they have booths were they give support directly to customers, they also fly-in to relevant studios to sort out any kind of performance or bug related problems they might be facing.

And theyve done that with some devs. rocket league obviously being the big one, where valve went to a linux dev and said "hey can you help port this"

And the point still stands that this is a future investment for them. They aren't pushing to make linux exclusive, they are pushing to make linux viable. Valve has ~360 employees. Linux has a ~1% gaming market share. If valve has even 4 employees working on Linux, they are essentially scaling their effort based on current income from the platform, whereas Sony/Microsoft get 100% of their income from a singular platform, so they spend 100% of their expenses on building that platform. If valve switched over and said "ok, all employees full bore on SteamOS, ignore windows", they would lose a LOT of money. Besides, the goal here isn't to make SteamOS "their" platform, they goal is to make gaming work on an open platform. Microsoft has to entice people with support in order to keep them locked in to their garden, Valve is trying to unlock the garden (to an extent).

if they want growth, they should spend more than just 1% on the platform, but people are acting like they are spending 0% on the platform. It's still improving and actively being worked on, but this is a big undertaking for a team of 4, OS updates, dev support, steam client, etc etc... And if the team is bigger than 4, then they are in fact spending more than 1% on a 1% market segment, which still proves the point of "they havent abandoned it, its just not growing at the 'right' pace in publicly obvious ways"

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

#233

Post by scholia » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 4:22 PM UTC

douche wrote: post #209

scholia wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I haven't seen the keyboard problem. The main one I saw was a disappearing mouse pointer, which was fixed by removing and re-attaching the keyboard. Weird.

You could try a software reset for the performance problems, bearing in mind that the updates will drive you mad. Unfortunately you can't fix the slow CPU or the too-small RAM. However, the current performance should still compare reasonably with another 2012 tablet.

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

Look out for Windows 10 on the Snapdragon 835 later this year ;-)

> Microsoft took a $900 million write-down on the product

Yes, I bet that hurt, even when you have the odd $100 billion in spare cash.

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

#234

Post by tonyedgecombe » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 7:56 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #61

willvarfar wrote: post #25

> We wouldn't even bring something to a conference if we didn't think this was a committed project and something that's part of our road map." As anyone who rode the rollercoaster of abandonment in the ActiveX years recalls, their previous MO was all about things that became uncommitted after being in their road map :( I really hope there's some kind of future for non-Intel players.

It would be nice for everybody if we could shed the Intel "tax".

Well, everybody but the Intel employees here.

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

#235

Post by MulliMulli » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 6:18 AM UTC

TwoBit wrote: post #200

Twirrim wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's hope so

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

#236

Post by untoreh » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 7:23 AM UTC

thisdepends888 wrote: post #80

zitterbewegung wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other issue for consumers is that SteamOs will give you a ~10% performance hit .

This blanket statement is not generally applicable. It can depend on rendering tech used, the game, and hardware. And this is going to be an issue in bleeding edge games mostly. Borderlands 2, for example, plays fine for me on a i7 930, with a GTX 570. An older rig. Dota 2 with OpenGL rendering hits or exceeds the Windows FPS when run on Linux. Switch to Vulkan though and it craters. Source engine games with OpenGL r…

> Source engine games with OpenGL rendering often outperform Windows.

nah, not really, only dota2, because has no wrapper, at least for valve's source games.

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

#237

Post by scholia » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 3:31 PM UTC

timthorn wrote: post #203

scholia wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but you couldn't AD join a Surface

Sorry, my mistake. Many thanks for the correction!

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

#238

Post by runeks » Sun, Mar 12, 2017, 2:07 PM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #128

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.

Reduced power comes from reduced complexity, and that has a performance cost, yes -- but it takes far more than a 10% increase in power to get a 10% increase in performance. Intel's designs, being tuned for high sequential performance, are significantly better for that purpose; but if you look at VPS services which currently only get a fraction of a CPU each, I'm sure they could run more power-efficiently with a larg…

What's the difference between 100 ARM CPUs @ 1 watt versus one Intel CPU @ 100 watt, except that you need a bigger data center for the ARMs?

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

#239

Post by saghm » Tue, Mar 14, 2017, 8:03 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #202

saghm wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it's a little disingenuous to compare Windows to SteamOS like this. Microsoft has quite a bit of pull with hardware manufacturers; there's a strong incentive for PC companies not to put out hardware that doesn't work with Windows (and I'd imagine extensive tests are done before releasing any such hardware to ensure that everything works with Windows, presumably with some degree of communication and cooperation with Microsoft). On the other hand, there's virtually no incentive for a PC maker to make sure that their hardware doesn't break things for SteamOS.