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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."
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?
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.
The important metric is MIPS/Watt. It doesn't matter if the CPU is "underpowered" if you can run a bunch of them in parallel to get the same performance as a Xeon, and still get better power consumption. Remember, the work they're doing is highly parallelizable, so outright clockspeed isn't very important.
However, I don't have any MIPS/Watt figures available for ARMs or Xeons, so this is idle speculation. If I were to take a guess, however, I'd guess that, given a real-world workload, the Xeons would probably beat the ARMs because of many factors: cache size, context-switching time, etc. If it were more economical to run a datacenter on tons of low-power ARMs, Google probably would have already done it by now.
As for craziness, remember, this is Microsoft we're talking about: the company that thought SongSmith would actually be a commercial success instead of a complete joke. Given their combination of big successes and utter failures, they seem to be quite neurotic.
MBA-ese for "take the blame"?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Nehalem is about 800 DMIPS/Watt (75500/95W), Cortex A9 is about 8,000 (4000/.5W). The Nehalem figure is based on Sandra results for the Core i7 870 link, Cortex is based on ARM's numbers for their power efficient model link
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Actually, current ARM processors are more than competitive with Intel's low-power offerings -- Arm Coretex A-8 cores have been benchmarked to match or exceed the performance of Intel Atom processors in integer performance while suffering a 25% clockspeed disadvantage, and while consuming around 1/20th the power. Floating point performance does indeed lag behind even Intel's Atom (its also one of the focus areas for the Cortex A-9 core), but is not a big requirement for server or database tasks.
There was some intersting reseach not too long ago which paired low-power x86 chips (Geode LX at the time, IIRC), Solid-state storage (in the form of compact flash) and a RAM-based caching of solid-state contents. About 10 of these boards were then clustered, running a distributed database application. As I recall, there were some serious performance and power-savings advantages compared to a single larger, multi-core x86 server setup. The primary advantage, in my oppinion, was that the ammount of available bandwidth, both to storage and to working RAM, combined with intelligent caching, was paired in much more favorable ratios to the power of the CPU. In short, the reseach found that a cluster of modest machines turns out to be competitive, even better-than, a single powerful server in terms of cost, power-consumption, heat disipation, and even in performance.
Microsoft is keen to realize that a modern ARM core is quite well suited to match modern I/O limitations. There's no point building a large system when the requests it's going to serve will be bottlenecked by I/O.