Slashdot Mirror
Job Ad Hints At Microsoft Move To ARM Servers
An anonymous reader passes along a brief EE Times note on a suggestive Microsoft job ad. ARM is explicitly mentioned, as are solid-state disk drives as an area of experimentation in the quest to reduce power consumption; but Intel does not get a mention. Here is the ad. "Microsoft is looking for senior software development engineer to help with its Bing data centers, potentially running them on ARM hardware, according to an EE Times article. Whoever gets the job 'can own the decision on the hardware that we use,' the job description said, and added that power management is a key aspect of the job. ... Microsoft was reportedly experimenting with the Intel Atom microprocessor in February 2009 with a view to creating a green low-power data center. One issue discussed then was the Atom microprocessor lacked performance compared with other Intel processors and that therefore any power saving might be negated by the need for more processors to carry a given computational load."
Not necessarily dropping intel:
They are just doing expirementation (s.i.c.) !
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
It looks like MS is going to switch their Bing data centers over to power efficient netbooks using ARM processors and use SSD for storage. Wow ... running the Internet on netbooks. Now that's thinking different!
I don't know about "owning the decision on the hardware we use", but I'd like to "own the decision on the software they use".
I am anarch of all I survey.
Does this mean that they have an internal build of NT on ARM, or is the world going to be graced with "Windows CE Datacenter Enterprise Edition" at some point?
Or they could cluster the ARMs under Linux and then run Windoze on a VM.
If taxation is legalized theft, then Capitalism is a prolonged rape followed by a slow death.
ARM is severely underpowered, even when comparing to Atom. So it doesn't make *any* sense that MS is considering it as a server platform.
However, ARM excels at low power consumption and mobility. This would allow a new array of "server helper" devices that had needed quick handling of light tasks. Maybe something like packet routing or on the fly network topology auto-configuration. Another concept could be mobile cache points which would be somehow networked to the main servers and provide "smart caching" of data for light user requests.
Who knows. But to think that ARM is going to somehow best Intel's chips in the server market is crazy.
BSD more likely.
One issue discussed then was the Atom microprocessor lacked performance compared with other Intel processors
Atom and ARM are great platforms when you don't need much processor in one spot. I.e. many embedded applications and a lot of consumer electronics. They need some processor, but not a lot. 'desktop/server' processors are optimized for a higher load and just don't scale down. Note that ARM isn't inherently low power, it's just the instruction set everyone in the world has rights to implement, and Intel pretty well dominated everything but an emerging low power market. You have a lot of innovation and skill at implementing 'just-enough' processors that simply picks ARM out of convenience.
In the data center context, things change. The notorious energy consumption of the low-power processors come to nothing when you can arbitrarily consolidate workload onto as few processors as possible. The economies of scale of the mainstream desktop/server platforms deliver are far greater than tiny low power devices.
In terms of MS experimenting with it, expect nothing to come of it. It will fail like Atom did in their experiment before. Assuming a long shot, expect nothing to change externally, even if MS discovers ARM is great for their data centers, they cannot readily win a market that centers around lower cost, lower energy, lower performance non-x86 compatible parts. They have a golden example of a company thinking their technology intrinsically drives the industry making a drastic change to discover they were wrong. Intel thought they dictated the terms of the industry, but Itanium simply failed to transform the market without quality x86 compatibility. This was the golden opportunity for AMD to swoop in with an alternative and make huge gains. MS is in the exact same situation, 99.9% of their clout is the environment of existing Windows apps. Microsoft has tried time after time various platforms to reach the same endgame of no success. If the new architecture in *theory* provided more performance, sufficient to emulate x86 instructions, then it would stand a remote chance, but going to lower performance platform renders this impossible. In a really long shot, MS gets a lot of really nice ARM hardware on the market, and then has to compete with Linux on its own merits rather than ecosystem of applications. It's nearly suicide to risk your largest leverage point unless the industry is imminently making you irrelevant even if you stick to your guns.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Here's a thought...most pure data retrieval tasks don't require a huge amount of compute power on the device making the request. If I were operating a datacenter with thousands of hits a second, I'd want to optimize for the ability to hold a session open, then offload the request to either a monster data layer or a midrange layer that brokers requests and caches frequent search results.
Something like a single-board computer (or a really scaled-up thin client :-) ) running a low-power processor dedicated to driving network interfaces that also have their own offloading processors would allow them to scale the access layer way up for less power costs. Reliability would be less of a concern too, because you could have tons of cheap devices for the same costs as a fraction of full servers.
When you scale out, you often don't need the overhead that full servers would give you, because you're limiting the tasks that layer of access has to do.
Or...they just want to see how many smartphones it would take to replace layer one of Bing. :-)
I'm waiting for the announcement of Windows Embedded CE 2011 Datacenter Edition.
MBA-ese for "take the blame"?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
You don't just plop down a bunch of ARM processors on a board and magically get suitable performance without scaling out memory architecture and such. The only way in the x86 space that very many core systems get acceptable results is by increasingly sophisticated memory architectures that demand more memory modules in aggregate to allow direct, lightly loaded paths between compute and memory. Those memory modules draw more energy, as does various strategies that put more memory controllers down to lighten the load and more. Scaling general-purpose computing tasks to many small cores simply has some significant challenges that drive up the incremental power requirements as it goes up.
The most performance per watt in pure compute power is currently PowerXCell 8i, which doesn't exist outside of an IBM blade as far as I know. If a datacenter wanted to *really* be serious about performance per watt, I think I'd see more QS22s lying around. Intel is admittedly not the leader in performance-per-watt, but the crown still lies in systems optimized for high resource utilization in a small number of CPU packages.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Where's my ARM netbooks damn it ?!
The slogan is "Bing it and decide".
Microsoft, just use Bing: "Atom or ARM for my datacenter?"
*Bam* (or bing) there's your answer!
You're welcome!
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.