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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."
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.
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.