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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."
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.
They're probably consolidating Bing down to a netbook to better serve the dozen or so people who use Bing.
And most of them are related to Steve Ballmer.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
It does; but one of their mechanical engineers came to a rather brilliant realization:
A WinCE PDA is almost exactly the same size as a data tape. With modest modifications(consisting largely of forcing the work experience kid to run lots and lots of docking cables) an industry standard tape silo can be turned into a gigantic WinCE/ARM blade farm. If a node stops responding, the robot retrieval arm pops it out, presses the reset button, and pops it back in again. Since the OS is in ROM, boot is short and downtime is minimal.
NT was written as a portable OS from grounds up (remember that it had a working MIPS build before x86 build!), and much of that legacy still remains today in OS architectural design, so porting the OS itself shouldn't be hard. The toolchain (compiler etc) is already there to target ARM for CE.
Drivers (third-party ones specifically) might be trickier, though they're still mostly written in C, so for the most part it should be a straightforward recompile.
Actually four of these accounts are owned by Steve Ballmer himself:
1. S.Ball (regular everyday personnal account)
2. Ballman (pr0n account)
3. MacLover (to be able to spy on Apple fanbois incognito)
4. Chairmaster (to do research on types of chairs, kinds of woods and aerodynamics of four-legged seating apparatus)