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Windows Server on ARM Is Finally Happening, And It Should Worry Intel (bloomberg.com)
Mary Jo Foley, writing for ZDNet: There have been rumors for the past several years that Windows Server would be coming to ARM. Today, March 8, that rumor became an acknowledged reality. Microsoft officials said that the company is committed to use ARM chips in machines running its cloud services. Microsoft will use the ARM chips in a cloud server design that its officials will detail at the the US Open Compute Project Summit today, March 8. Microsoft has been working with both Qualcomm and Cavium on the version of Windows Server for ARM, according to company officials. From a report on Bloomberg: Intel chips have remained one of the sole big-name products widely in use. Microsoft's work with ARM, in progress for several years, could pave the way for a real challenge to Intel, which controls more than 99 percent of the market for server chips. [...] Any challenge to Intel's dominance in server chips is a threat to its most profitable business and main revenue driver as demand for PC processors continues to shrink. The company's Data Center Group turned $17.2 billion of sales into $7.5 billion of operating profit in 2016, and Intel has been running ads that say, "98 percent of the cloud runs on Intel."
PowerShell is horribly verbose
PS offers shorthand syntax for most commands. I find it much less verbose in general, since it passes data structures which can be easily deconstructed instead of strings which need to be parsed.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Still lots of other ways it is bloated, and one can find some pretty minimalistic Linux installs that Windows Server could never come close to in small footprint.
Well, there is always Windows Server Nano. It's approximately 410 MB installed, I believe.
They cut it down to *only* 400 Megabytes and called it NANO!?!?
I didn't realize M$ was such good comedians.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
In the age of 2 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD phones, 400 MB is femto... Given current memory pricing, it's often cheaper to toss in a 1 GB flash chip than a 128 MB flash chip, especially if you want to interface with a more modern processor (faster speeds, etc.)
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
you have to worry about performance per watt, not just raw watts. If you get lower transactions (or whatever) per watt with ARM then you've solved nothing and perhaps made things worse. Previous generation ARM chips couldn't match Intel on performance per watt, perhaps the current and future gen ARM chips can change that? I haven't seen that they have succeeded yet though.
ARM has been an interesting platform of late, but a lot less useful than it could be. Proprietary bootloaders, custom hardware trees, all work against it. No ARM device that I know of can run a stock, off-the-shelf Linux distro with a fairly stock kernel. Not even the Pi. Maybe if MS starts pushing a Window ARM platform, it might provide impetus to manufacturers to standardize the boot loader and the platform so off-the-shelf OS's can run.
I have a drawer full of various ARM devices that were theoretically really neat and useful but in practice proved to be more trouble than they were worth. For example I have two sheevaplugs but the effort to try to update them from their default ancient ubuntu distro is via tftp and serial port u-boot prompt is just not worth the effort. I got more utility with a cheap Intel NUC, even though it was several times the cost of the plug.
Life is a bit better with the Pi since I can just burn a new SD card and boot on it. Still requires a custom distro and kernel. Repeat for every SBC like the Pine64.
Until things get more standardized, I'm skeptical that ARM will do any serious damage to the Intel hegemony, low power notwithstanding.
How is ARM any more of a threat today than AMD was?
It's not. You're just ignoring the fact that AMD has on several occasions been a threat to Intel.