Windows Server on ARM Is Finally Happening, And It Should Worry Intel (bloomberg.com) 193
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."
I wonder (Score:2)
Nope... (Score:2)
Intel is not worried. How is ARM any more of a threat today than AMD was?
Intel started building lower powered chips a long time ago to compete with ARM and have, in a number of areas, surpassed them. Time and again, Intel has been able to ramp up their R&D to stave off serious competition. I don't see ARM being any different.
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If Intel has been such a great success at low power chips, why is it exactly that ARM still dominates in the low power world?
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I think that the poster meant lower power server chips for devices like NAS boxes and routers, but not mobile parts. I could be wrong, though.
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Honestly, it's probably because the margins are so low in mobile. Maybe they could compete with a $25 system-on-chip that implements an entire cell phone, but where is the profit?
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why is it exactly that ARM still dominates in the low power world?
Scope. There's not a lot of markup selling a chip to a mobile phone or tablet manufacturer.
Server hardware on the other hand... well let me count the number of ARM chips commonly used in business back-end servers. Aaaand done, didn't even need to lift a finger.
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Because ARM is entrenched in that market.
Just like Intel is entrenched in servers/desktops (and therefore incredibly hard to displace, despite the fact you could make an ARM chip just as powerful), ARM is entrenched in low power even though Intel could make a low power chip. It's not worth the effort for those making low power devices to switch to Intel due to the massive investment in time and tools it would take for what would be very slight advantage (if any - after all, due to the insane x86 instruction
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Because until now Intel has never paid any attention to the low power market. Intel bread and butter is in the desktop and server markets. If, and that is a big if, ARM does make some in roads into the server market then I imagine Intel being the 800 pound gorilla might just have something to say about it.
Besides intel has a excellent low power chip. I have a intel atom processor in my data pad here. The battery life on it is about 10 hours, give or take. It has roughly the same battery life a the
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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 [pcworld.com]
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Well, what do you know. I stand corrected.
Re:Nope... (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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> Intel just did massive layoffs and
> struck a deal with ARM to produce 10nm chips when Intel finally figures out 10nm.
You wouldn't happen to have links handy by chance please? TIA.
I don't recall seeing both of these on /.'s front page ...
Re:Nope... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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ARM are low performance chips, that's why they have the room to improve. Intel server chips crush ARM in performance. Let's take a typical hyperconverged server my employer uses with 8 six core Xeon processors, how many of your USB powered ARM servers will it take to equal that? A row of racks?
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ARM are low performance today because they haven't had the investment x86 got. Back in the 80's when Acorn first released their Archimedes running on ARM it was 10x quicker than an equivalent Intel x86 machine. There's nothing specific to ARM that makes it low performance, just that they have been focussed on the low energy market but with a significant push the ARM architecture can easily make massive performance gains. These things look pretty neat: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
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There's nothing specific to ARM that makes it low performance, just that they have been focussed on the low energy market but with a significant push the ARM architecture can easily make massive performance gains.
There's nothing specific to Intel that makes it high energy, just that they have been focussed [sic] on the high performance market but with a significant push the Intel architecture can easily make massive energy reductions.
Re:Nope... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Atom was working fine on cheap netbooks and HTPCs until Intel decided it had to compete on smartphones and tablets and then it failed. In addition they didn't invest as much on new designs as they should and they get outclassed by current top ARM processors as well.
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Intel has not struggled in the phone business because the processors suck. It's because they handicap the processor and put limits on their use to try to avoid cannibalizing desktop and server sales.
It's those restrictions that have kept them out of the market, not performance or cost. Intels Atom line could have taken over the phone business if Intel had released all those restrictions, but they likely would have lost the desktop market to them as well which would have decimated their profits. They decided
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The latest phone Atom chips were perfectly competitive with midrange ARM stuff [anandtech.com], but I don't think they saw any economic sense continuing this.
And ARM servers were supposed to be huge every year since iPhone made it big, I recon this will happen during the year of the Linux desktop.
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> And ARM servers were supposed to be huge every year since iPhone made it big,
Thing is without Microsoft along for the ride that wasn't really a possibility, at least to start. Now it is. Run it all on an ARM with x86 emulation so no porting. As long as the emulation performance hit isn't terrible the cost savings for cloud farms will be tempting.
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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:
As opposed to ARM's foray into high performance desktop and server processors, which doesn't even exist. Oh but it could be done, it's just that the ARM licensees don't like money.
Like I always say though, the design / product that hasn't yet been implemented will always win against the one that has.
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Exactly.
ARM will not replace Intel in the high-power CPU market. The one that's Intel's bread and butter with Xeons that cost $10,000+.
ARM will however replace the lower power CPU m
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Exactly. Not every server is a high-end number crunching machine. The only server I'm running right now that I wouldn't really contemplate moving to ARM if it were available and was more economical than x86 would probably be our RDBMS servers, where cycles mean a helluva lot. But for our web, email, file and print servers, frankly when I look at them, they're spending a helluva lot of time idling, and the reason I don't virtualize all of them on one server is more about redundancy. As it is we have a three
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ARM will not replace Intel in the high-power CPU market.
Of course not, but there is a company that makes high-power cpu designs and will be buying time on 10nm fabs before Intel figures out 10nm.
So for low power, Intel cant compete at all, and in high power, Intel will be behind.
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When you have an existing x86 VM host farm, how exactly does ARM look appealing? I can't add ARM hosts to the same cluster because they can't run the same VMs as the existing x86 hosts.
What's the need for adding any more overhead in the form of a new CPU category, new hardware, etc, when the marginal hardware cost of adding an additional VM to most existing VM environments is essentially zero?
Maybe this makes sense in niche cases where you have zillions of low-power server images and you're building cluste
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A VM can burst easily if load spikes, a physical server cannot unless you build the software to cluster and add more physical servers...
Having 32 VMs in a 1u server is no problem, i have a 1U server with 144gb ram that's a few years old now (hp dl160 g6) that runs many linux instances, some with as little as 128mb of ram.
These VMs may be small, but they will beat small arm servers on processor bound tasks assuming that only a small number of them are under load at any one time (which is the case)... The onl
Re:Nope... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Finally ARM in improving (Score:3)
Obvious Nonsense (Score:2)
Everybody knows, "the Cloud runs on Intel."
Invalid conclusion (Score:2)
AMD busy fighing last war (Score:2)
sorry i fucked up back there (Score:2)
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Too much competition and too little profit in ARM to bother.
Alpha redux... (Score:2)
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Exactly. When you're using Linux or one of the BSDs, most of the apps you want to run are FLOSS, and it's just a question of recompiling them. With Windows, most of the applications you'll want to run are X86 binaries which will have to be translated (i.e. slow) to run on ARM and will be probably buggy. It's dead on arrival.
Perhaps Microsoft could use it internally on Azure but I don't see this having much impact.
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Will it run in a VM? will arm systems be locked to (Score:3)
Will it run in a VM? will arm systems be locked to windows boot loaders? don't want to be stuck with hyper-v.
Do ARM chips have the pci-e for storage / 10-gig-e (Score:2)
Do ARM chips have the pci-e for storage / 10-gig-e?
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Do ARM chips have the pci-e for storage / 10-gig-e?
Yes.
Marvell:Armada XP supports four PCI-e 2.0 ports (two x4 ports can be configured to Quad x1 – up to 16 lanes)
Calxeda: Energycore SoC supports PCI Express Four (4) integrated Gen2 PCIe controllers
nVidia Tegra 2 also supports PCI-e. The ARM and PCI-e licenses are compatible. Electrically of course, the choice of supported buses is entirely up to the chip designer.
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PCIe2, wow. Obsolete junk.
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and only 16 lanes.
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Obsolete? Perhaps you should look up a definition of the word. Junk it isn't, 8GBps* should be more than enough for any reasonable use case.
(* 0.5GBps per lane x 16 lanes)
Worry Intel, really? (Score:2)
Let's assume the following :
- 25% of servers run Linux
- 50% of servers run Windows
- Linux is compatible with ARM
- 1% of server CPUs are ARM, the remaining 99% are Intel
- All ARM servers run Linux
- The situation with Windows Server will now be the same as with Linux regarding platforms.
With these generous assumptions in mind, Intel market share will drop from 99% to 97%, that's 2% less sales, big deal...
The reason servers don't run ARM is not because of incompatibilities. It is because they need more computi
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Let's look at this slightly differently:
The age of the x86 family being a dominant platform is waning, as mobile computing continues to eat away its market share. It's not that the PC slice is "shrinking", so much as the rest of the market is growing much faster.
Intel isn't headed by fools, and they are aware that they're missing an opportunity. There's money Intel hasn't been successful in getting. Intel has been trying to enter the low-power, portable, and embedded markets, and has been unsuccessful thus
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So think of it this way: ARM is able to encroach into a market where Intel dominates, but the reverse is not true, in spite of many attempts.
This isn't really the case though.
Intel made one or two pushes into small/mobile and failed. There have been a number of attempts to get ARM into the datacenter. AMD even did a start/stop with ARM.
Realistically, the incumbent in each market enjoys a number of advantages---working infrastructure like peripheral device standards, solid drivers and high-level interfaces, and strong validation/support from industry partners.
These practical advantages are worth far more than the theoretical advantage offered by
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So think of it this way: ARM is able to encroach into a market where Intel dominates, but the reverse is not true, in spite of many attempts.
ARM is able huh? I guess the lack of any high performance ARM processors is due to the fact that ARM licensees don't like money?
The product that doesn't exist will always beat the one that was built. No nasty aspects of physics and market forces to get in the way of it's success.
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Behind mobile computing lies huge datacenters full of powerful servers. This is Intel's new market.
Intel isn't pushing that hard for the embedded market. They made a few half-assed attempts but that's about it. The reason they don't push harder, I think, is price. There is plenty of competition in the mobile market and margins are thin. Intel is a big US-based company with high running costs, there is no way it could win a price war.
It is much better suited for high performance computing where margins are h
Closed-source and multi-arch don't mix (Score:2)
Enjoy the CPU overhead of emulating x86 programs on an ARM CPU!
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Why would they do that? Most of what constitutes Windows, even 20 years ago, was portable. If there's a port of the CLR, well that's .NET (and much of Powershell and its toolkit) taken care of, and I'm sure even CMD.EXE and the older NT toolkit having been built on a system intended to be portable between architectures, is still cross-compiliable. I can imagine that some things like many Server components will require some work to run natively on ARM, I cannot imagine MS going to the effort to produce an AR
Re:Closed-source and multi-arch don't mix (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Might bring about some standardization finally (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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No ARM device that I know of can run a stock, off-the-shelf Linux distro with a fairly stock kernel.
The Raspberry Pi is one of the more proprietary ones out there, and gets away with being non-standard because the Foundation maintains the fork well enough that few feel any desire to use a standard distribution and kernel (instead opting for NOOBS or Raspbian).
On the other hand, the C.H.I.P. and BeagleBone Black both use standard kernels, and use that fact as a selling point.
In fact, most non-Pi small board
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Very interesting. So I can just run stock ARM Debian on the BBB? And move the SD card to the C.H.I.P. and have it boot up? If so, that's good news.
Re:Might bring about some standardization finally (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:How ARM will handle the bloat? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
Re:How ARM will handle the bloat? (Score:4, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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I stopped writing complicated bash (well, back in those days, ksh) scripts when I learned Perl.
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So, in other words, once it has grabbed up large amounts of memory to hold the libraries in, it's really fast. Well, okay, but that would apply to any environment with a cache. And that represents the significant philosophical divide between Microsoft and *nix. Powershell needs to load vast portions of the .NET libraries just to run, while *nix is built upon a minimalist model of only loading what you need. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but I prefer discrete tools with a shell as a sort glue,
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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
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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.
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I haven't tried to do registry stuff remotely in a very long time, but I remember being able to connect to remote registries in Windows 95... We used to mess with each other during computer class that way.
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This is the goal of both Windows and Linux, long term. The goal is to have virtual servers you configure once with a ruleset, then chuck and rebuild instead of trying to upgrade and maintain. Knowing the "pets versus cattle" aspect can score someone a job in an interview versus a hearty "thank you... next in line, please."
As time goes by, PowerShell is only going to get more emphasis, just because it is far easier to add cmdlets than to add usable GUI functionality.
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I don't know if pets vs cows really applies perfectly here.
Near as I understand it, any system could fall into this including complex systems that handle the creation and destruction of individual nodes or virtual nodes, not just the end individual nodes themselves. The crux of the argument isn't about the scale of the system, it's about the willingness of the maintainer to replace a system instead of spending inordinate amounts of resources maintaining something for sentimental reasons. If sentimentality
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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 [microsoft.com]. It's approximately 410 MB installed, I believe.
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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 [microsoft.com]. 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.
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Re:How ARM will handle the bloat? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Come on back when you can code a server in less than 10Meg that's with the OS and the application servers.
10 whole Megs? Try ConTiki web server on a Commodore 64.
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There are no lack of embedded devices which have constraints a lot smaller than that, whether it's due to price point or simply because achieving the smallest possible size with the lowest power consumption is essential. Now maybe it's unfair to suggest that Windows has much of a place in these kinds of devices, the fact is that you can make really really really small Linux distros whose footprints can be below 8-10mb (I think a minimalist OpenWRT install could fit in 2mb).
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Further to that, it looks like a minimal uClinux install can fit in about 2mb:
http://www.emc [emcraft.com]
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There are no lack of embedded devices which have constraints a lot smaller than that, whether it's due to price point or simply because achieving the smallest possible size with the lowest power consumption is essential.
A mix of all three. I'm currently using a CC2541 chip, which has a generous 2k of RAM and 128k flash. It's a bluetooth low energy chip, and depending on the application you can run for many months off a single coin cell. It's very, very power sensitive. And also tends to go into small, cheap
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> In the age of 2 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD phones, 400 MB is femto
That'd be "femto": from the Greek femtos, lit, "nearly one quarter"
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I was under the impression that you could shut even that GUI off. We still run with the minimalist GUI so we can edit config files and the like.
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A lot of that GUI bloat has been reduced dramatically since 10-15 years ago. Plus Server Core has been around since 2008 with command line only, and Server Nano was released for 2016 which is even leaner and has no remote desktop (it works more like Linux SSH-only management).
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I kind of feel that 2016 is a bit more bloated than 2012 R2 when you install it "with GUI"
What's the resource usage difference?
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Windows "server" boots the GUI first!
Not all windows servers boot to a GUI. Some versions haven't done that for quite a while.
In fact it's quite the opposite now. Windows Server 2016 Tech Preview installs just like Ubuntu-Server. It doesn't provide you the option of even installing a GUI, you'll need to add that after first boot.
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It isn't a threat currently, but one can be sure that if ARM saw that it could make an in-road into the data center, it might just ponder making chips with greater overall horsepower for a "server line" of ARM CPUs. Just because ARM at the moment is more interested in low power chips doesn't mean they wouldn't ponder a move towards higher performance, and certainly if they could advertise both Windows and Linux as supported platforms, that makes for a pretty compelling argument.
The fact that Microsoft is go
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Or maybe it's a chicken-egg problem and Microsoft decided to make the first step. Or maybe they're seeing more requests for Windows Server on ARM and they've made projections about future demand and it's going to happen soon according to their numbers.
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Considering MS already ported the Windows kernel to ARM a while back, and certainly Windows NT, including the older CLI toolkit were all ported over to multiple architectures back in the day, it may not be all that hard. Obviously there's going to be some recompiling and porting over of a lot of server components, so I'm not saying that porting the entire Server ecosystem to ARM will be trivial, but it's not really a massive leap, just a lot of recompiling and testing. A lot of the admin tools have been mov
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Did something change?
ARM on 10nm.
Mass production has begun, while Intel is still at least a year away from 10nm. Its why Intel announced last August that when it finally does get 10nm to work, it will be making ARM processors not just x86 in those fabs.
Intel is rightly fucked as a vertical company. A decade from now Intel, if it hasnt been decimated and sold off by then, will be just another rent-a-fab company.
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Intel's 14nm process is in most ways better than Samsung's 10nm (Qualcomm's fab for this chip). IMHO this isn't really going to be won on feature size of the process between the two.
The advantages Cavium and Qualcomm have are cheaper chips (also more integrated, SAS, PCI lanes) with higher core counts and more memory channels than Intel. In some applications the higher memory channels count and bandwith will be very valuable (HPC). Intel will be able to discount the heck out of their high core count Xeon
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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 ear
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Anon here, this article seems to break it down:
Lets check that "break down"
..."
"Intel’s processes use the same backbone as the advertised node (a 14nm process will use a 14nm backbone)
See right here? Thats a lie. You are reading a lie and not questioning it. Intel is the semiconductor manufacturer that invented lying about node size. There is no feature in Intel chips that are 14nm be they their "14nm" chips or their new kaby lake "14nm+" chips, yet your article says Intel is the only one doing true 14nm. Its fucking comical how big a lie y
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Yeah but XScale started out as StrongARM from DEC. Intel basically got the design team when they bought some of the remains of DEC. They basically applied some of the chip design ideas from the Alpha for an ARM core. Eventually Intel sold that business to Broadcom I think. They still have an ARM license but I'm not aware of them using it for anything right now.
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Intel has enough money they could throw 2-3 teams on it if they wanted to. One of them would succeed.
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If you manage a server farm, you have to worry about power consumption:
1. the more power you require, the more heat you generate
2. the more heat you generate, the more cooling you require
3. the more your hardware runs on higher temperatures, the lower its lifespan
Granted, #3 might not be relevant with rapidly changing technologies, but then again there's still companies out there using old servers running COBOL and FORTRAN so you never really know how long your servers will run. Could be a year, could be a
Re:What if you dont care about power consumption? (Score:4, Insightful)
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They won't. There seems to be some belief among younger folks that ARM is somehow special and that instruction set is more important than anything else. The reality is that is simply NOT true. Instruction set is essentially meaningless. Intel chips haven't used x86 internally since the first Pentium chips. The x86 is decoded and fed to the internal processor by a decoder that uses less than 123K transistors (not even 0.1% of the die). Because x86 is nothing more than an abstraction layer at this point this
Re: (Score:2)
It's not just the decoder, branch prediction is more complex (more scope for bugs), the pipeline has to be more complex due to the variable length instructions that can be one byte long up to 7 bytes long. It doesn't matter a lot in chips where you have few very powerful processors (traditional servers), but where you have many many low power processors it adds up.
Re: (Score:2)
If all this was true then AMD could not sell their server processors.
Yet they are highly popular.
And they, like all AMP processors run hot.
Re: (Score:2)
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 [eweek.com]
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.