Job Ad Hints At Microsoft Move To ARM Servers

An anonymous reader passes along a brief EE Times note on a suggestive Microsoft job ad. ARM is explicitly mentioned, as are solid-state disk drives as an area of experimentation in the quest to reduce power consumption; but Intel does not get a mention. Here is the ad. "Microsoft is looking for senior software development engineer to help with its Bing data centers, potentially running them on ARM hardware, according to an EE Times article. Whoever gets the job 'can own the decision on the hardware that we use,' the job description said, and added that power management is a key aspect of the job. ... Microsoft was reportedly experimenting with the Intel Atom microprocessor in February 2009 with a view to creating a green low-power data center. One issue discussed then was the Atom microprocessor lacked performance compared with other Intel processors and that therefore any power saving might be negated by the need for more processors to carry a given computational load."

Netbooks!

[WrongSizeGlass]

It looks like MS is going to switch their Bing data centers over to power efficient netbooks using ARM processors and use SSD for storage. Wow ... running the Internet on netbooks. Now that's thinking different!

I don't know..

[ignavus]

I don't know about "owning the decision on the hardware we use", but I'd like to "own the decision on the software they use".

Re:Product Experimentation

[Cryacin]

Whenever I hear about ARM and CPU Core's, I always get this unbelievable urge to dig up Total Annihilation.

I know, I'm weird.

Re:ARM Processors

[Evil_Ether]

Or they could cluster the ARMs under Linux and then run Windoze on a VM.

Re:Netbooks!

[binarylarry]

They're probably consolidating Bing down to a netbook to better serve the dozen or so people who use Bing.

And most of them are related to Steve Ballmer.

Re:ARM Processors

[ushering05401]

BSD more likely.

Re:Netbooks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually four of these accounts are owned by Steve Ballmer himself:
1. S.Ball (regular everyday personnal account)
2. Ballman (pr0n account)
3. MacLover (to be able to spy on Apple fanbois incognito)
4. Chairmaster (to do research on types of chairs, kinds of woods and aerodynamics of four-legged seating apparatus)

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Better to question whether you are clever enough to moderate, than to post and remove all doubt.

ARM NETBOOKS ?

[kiljoy001]

Where's my ARM netbooks damn it ?!