Microsoft Works On Windows For ARM-Based Servers

SmartAboutThings writes According to some reports from the industry, Microsoft is working on a version of its software for servers that run on chips based on ARM Holdings's technology. Windows Server now runs on Intel hardware, but it seems that Redmond wants to diversify its strategy. An ARM-based version of Windows Server could help challenge Intel's dominance and make a place for ARM in the server market, not only in mobile chips. According to the article, though, Microsoft "hasn’t yet decided whether to make the software commercially available."

Comments

Re:Link = Download?

[Mr Z]

Remove the / from the end of the link and it works. Annoying.

Irrelevant

[ArhcAngel]

The majority of shops these days run a hypervisor on the bare metal and load Windows as a virtual machine. Now if Microsoft is working on an ARM version of Hyper-V that's a different story. But even the hard core Microsoft shops I work with use VMWare as their hypervisor of choice.

Those who don't know history...

[bobbied]

Are bound to repeat it. (And those who do know history are doomed to watch helplessly while others repeat it).

Didn't Microsoft try this with NT? I recall that it had a DEC workstation Variant (Not that it worked all that well.)

My guess is that all the people who understood why this effort failed so completely are now gone and few are left who remember the lesson learned for Microsoft in that boondoggle. So the young bucks are now in the process of repeating the history they don't know. They will get *some* market share, but for the price sensitive user, Linux will be a better option for ARM because going to ARM only makes sense for large sized installs. Large installs have huge license costs and start to look cheaper on Linux, even with the management costs being more.

My guess is that this won't go well for Microsoft, but if they want to shoot themselves in the foot again, so be it. Personally, I'd not want to poke the Intel bear too much if I was Microsoft.

There may be no efficiency gains

[Junta]

ARM won over in the mobile device space because of solid engineering around a low power envelope, without trying to compete with x86 performance in any way. Basically Intel made a mistake by not having *any* appropriate chips for that space at all. Performance per watt was never demonstrated to be better if you followed the curve up to desktop/server class energy consumption. Intel has actually competently answered in their Atom space, and has secured some mindshare among Android vendors (which I never would have guessed could be possible). Intel is second comer to the party and thus the ecosystem is clearly stacked against them, but they still managed to get their components in the market.

Some vendors are starting to tout ARM based competitors to Xeon. The problem being their energy consumption numbers at this point are actually higher and achieve lower performance numbers in compute and have worse I/O capability.