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."

So...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Does this mean that they have an internal build of NT on ARM, or is the world going to be graced with "Windows CE Datacenter Enterprise Edition" at some point?

Re:Have to note as a big 'duh'

[ducomputergeek]

We found this when testing our point of sale app. So long as the POS software was running only the POS software on the terminal with the DB hosting on another machine/server, it was great. But as soon as you coupled POS + DB on the same terminal, lag started to be noticed. It was still acceptable, but it would take 3 seconds to create a new ticket vs. less than a second on a 2.8Ghz P4. Especially on the single core Atoms. The Dual Core atoms seemed to handle things just as well as their 2.8Ghz & 3Ghz power hungry Pentium they were to be replacing. And we tested both Windows XP/WEPOS & Linux (openSuSE/Ubuntu) and saw the same results.

Re:Maybe not for the server hardware itself

[h4rr4r]

You can get ARM blades with many chips on one blade already. This is not each little machine with its own network interface, the overhead would be massive.

Re:Maybe not for the server hardware itself

[afidel]

Nehalem is about 800 DMIPS/Watt (75500/95W), Cortex A9 is about 8,000 (4000/.5W). The Nehalem figure is based on Sandra results for the Core i7 870 link [guru3d.com], Cortex is based on ARM's numbers for their power efficient model link [arm.com]

Re:"own the decision"

[Cjstone]

Yeah. "If this goes well, you'll be a hero. If it doesn't, it's your fault and you'll never work in the industry again."

Re:So...

[afidel]

i860/MIPS/Alpha/PPC/x86/x64/IA64 are the platforms that are known to have been supported by NT over the generations.

Re:Netbooks!

[dudpixel]

they dont need to run the whole internet. Its Bing, not Google.

(hint: joke)