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."

Comments

How ARM will handle the bloat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am curious on how the lean ARM processors would cope up with the Windows bloat. Windows "server" boots the GUI first!

Re:How ARM will handle the bloat?

[MightyMartian]

To each his own. Maybe it's because I've been using *nix for over a quarter of a century, and simply find the toolkit a lot easier to use and understand, and I've never particular bought into this notion that objects are better, considering anything requiring actually listing data inevitably has to be transformed into strings anyways. I find the object nature of Powershell to be just another irritant.

Re:How ARM will handle the bloat?

[Hadlock]

I use both on a daily basis, have used both side by side now for almost a decade, Powershell is at least as powerful as bash, at least as easy to write and maintain

Performance per watt

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I heard, Intel still beats ARM easily on performance per watt and that is what's important in the data center, not absolute power usage. Did something change? The Cavium wasn't all that competitive in benchmarks and I'd surprised if Qualcomm managed anything better.

Re:Nope...

[Rockoon]

Intel is not worried.

Sure, thats why Intel just did massive layoffs and struck a deal with ARM to produce 10nm chips when Intel finally figures out 10nm.

Not worried at all.... oh... wait.... you havent been paying attention...

Re:Might bring about some standardization finally

[sl3xd]

ARM was once a simple architecture that was defined in a small pamphlet.

Once people started to use it, its size began to grow. Soon backwards compatibility became a concern, and the specification grew further.

Every successful specification grows to a size the uninitiated consider absurd. Undefined behavior is the enemy, and a good specification needs to define behavior for corner cases that 99.9999% of readers will never think of, let alone see. Once in the spec, they tend to remain there, because somebody is invariably going to depend on that behavior.

Don't get me wrong - I like RISC-V. But don't confuse a current lack of baggage with superiority. The baggage will come.