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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."
Server Core can be run without said bloat. It's a pain to use, of course, because PowerShell is horribly verbose and it makes many CLI tasks long-winded and annoying as compared to *nix, but we have some HyperV servers that run that way, and we can actually do remote administration via the Server and HyperV tools so it's not that bad overall. 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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Got malware?
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...
"His name was James Damore."
Depending on what needs configured, using the MMC on a GUI workstation associated with the Domain in question may let most of those configuration tasks happen without ever having to touch a command line.
It's oddly reminicent of the Novell model, which was where one put a minimal config on the server and then did the rest of the job with the supervisor account from a workstation. You couldn't even do most tasks directly on the server once it was set up, it was basically only really useful for operating the local tape backup. Everything else was done from whatever Novell-connected workstation you logged on to.
Back to Microsoft's current direction, it makese sense both for lightly equipped servers, presumably where there are lots of them working in parallel, and for VMs that are created and destroyed at will, for there to be very little actual on-box configuration to get them working. You don't want to have to manually manage dozens or hundreds of servers, you want to be able to do those tasks to the whole set as a group. Whether you use GUI or CLI, being able to do that from a single point makes a lot more sense.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
For mundane tasks, Windows' remote admin is hard to beat, and providing there are no major roadblocks, most (probably 90%+) of the server tasks I've done over the last ten years or so were all done via the MMC remote admin components on my workstation. Some more complicated tasks can be done via remote admin, but can be a bit of a pain (like registry changes), and I end up just logging into the server instead.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
ARM doesn't make chips, it licenses designs to FABs who actually make them. Even Intel is making ARM chips again. Intel hasn't been able to get down to the very low power levels that an ARM CPU can run at without serious compromises on performance. ARM chips still have a lot of performance to give which is why we see them increasing rapidly each year like we did with the x86 back in the 90's and early 2000's. There's only so much that can be got out of a design and Intel has been flatlining for years since they debuted the i3/i5/i7 line and in that period ARM chips have got multiple times faster per core, and added more cores, not to mention tricks like having low and high power cores on the same die. All of this makes them attractive for servers, especially now that 64 bit ARM is out there. I've got a RP3 which is 64 bit and it zips along nicely with Linux and there's a whole bunch of useful things it can do in a machine which runs of a small USB power supply.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Intel's low power foray into mobile SoC with the Atom platform has been about as successful as Windows Mobile was. So much so they're bailing:
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329580
"As it proceeds with a massive restructuring plan announced earlier this month, Intel will exit the smartphone and tablet mobile SoC business by ending its struggling Atom chip product line. The discontinued products include those code-named SoFIA, Broxton and Cherry Trail."
Atom chipsets have been anemic compared to the ARM processors, and now ARM is going to move into the low end blade space for Windows/Linux servers where Intel was positioning Atoms for cloud clusters.
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.
Intel's 14nm process is in most ways better than Samsung's 10nm
Citation needed, and no I dont accept a citation that basically says "thats not real 10nm" because that 14nm intel isnt real 14nm. IIRC the smallest feature size on Intel 14nm is still 28nm, and thats after improvements while still at "14nm." Intel invented lying about feature size.
Also, Samsung isnt the only fab company beginning 10nm mass production well before Intel. TSMC and Toshiba will be mass produing before the end of the year (the end of the year is when Intel last said would be the absolute earliest that they could do it.)
TSMC, Samsung, and Global Foundries are also in a partnership with IBM on working out the kinks on 7nm. Intel is very fucked.
"His name was James Damore."
Will it run in a VM? will arm systems be locked to windows boot loaders? don't want to be stuck with hyper-v.
I found the .NET programmer!
Come on back when you can code a server in less than 10Meg that's with the OS and the application servers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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
moox. for a new generation.
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.
Further to that, it looks like a minimal uClinux install can fit in about 2mb:
http://www.emcraft.com/stm32f4...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
.Net Micro is actually pretty teeny for what it is; but it bears about the same relationship to anything Windows that Micropython does to anything Linux: surprisingly good compatibility, for something that supports slightly upmarket microcontrollers, with a popular language used on the OS; but otherwise unrelated.
Oh I'm sure they've re-compiled the OS and everything that comes with it (where necessary) for ARM, the trouble comes when you go to install any closed source 3rd-party software on it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I stopped writing complicated bash (well, back in those days, ksh) scripts when I learned Perl.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Of course Intel paid attention to the low power market, which is where the Atom came from. And where is the Atom now????
Intel cuts Atom chips
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Really?
About 1 1/2 years ago, AMD was on its way out in the server market because the Opterons were not competitive enough anymore: http://www.eweek.com/servers/amd-aims-to-reinvigorate-x86-server-business.html
Now they are going to give it another try with Zen, and I think it is a promising try. But then again, Zen is not more power hungry than comparable Xeons. Maybe less so.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Yep I'm sure a monopoly suddenly releasing capable server chips and desktop chips for half the cost was no threat at all. Intel are really good at one thing: resting on their laurels.
I would wager the opposite: AMD had for long periods been a serious competitor to Intel with shorter periods resulted by some stupid business decisions and the odd dud product.