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posted by martyb on Thursday July 18 2019, @10:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the implementation-cost-an-ARM-*and*-a-leg? dept.

Windows Server on ARM was announced to much fanfare in March 2017, with servers powered by Qualcomm Centriq 2400 and Cavium ThunderX2 processors co-developed with Microsoft showcased at the OCP US Summit. At the time, Azure vice president Jason Zander told Bloomberg that "this is a significant commitment on behalf of Microsoft. We wouldn't even bring something to a conference if we didn't think this was a committed project and something that's part of our road map."

That road map has quite clearly hit a dead end—a lack of updates from Microsoft of the subject, and the absence of any partners involved with the project (or companies in the ARM-for-servers market generally) at this year's Microsoft Inspire conference strongly indicates the initiative is dead.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/2-years-later-theres-still-no-windows-server-arm-in-microsoft-azure/


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  • (Score: 1) by hwertz on Saturday July 20 2019, @06:27AM

    by hwertz (8141) on Saturday July 20 2019, @06:27AM (#869306)

    I would guess the big problem is emulation; I had a VERY nice ARM notebook running for a while, a Chromebook with NVidia K1 one it. This is a 32-bit quad-core ARM with a NVidia chip roughly equivalent to a GTX650, all using about 5 watts of power. Incredible battery life. Following some online instructions, I got Ubuntu 16.04 for ARM on there, and got it upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 (with the original kernel, Xorg/mesa/etc. 3d stack, so I could keep using the nvidia driver.) It even had CUDA working with 192 CUDA cores. I did get qemu on there to emulate both x86 and x86-64 for the very few apps that needed it (for me, a samsung printer driver, plus I went ahead and installed Android Studio, using the native ARM java but the couple binaries it called to package .APKs ran under emulation.) Odd emulating a 64-bit system on a 32-bit one, but it worked! The emulation speed was poor, but the samsung driver and bits that ran during a APK build only used a second or two of CPU time anyway. Everything ran GREAT.

    (Don't use it any more simply because this particular machine lasted about 2 years, then almost every component disintegrated over the course of like a month... the battery went from 18 hours per charge, to 1 hour, to completely zero; the bottom of the case got numerous cracks (no I didn't drop it); the trackpad started acting up, the keyboard started seriously acting up, and the power connector was intermittent (which is bad when the battery holds absolutely no charge.))

    Windows? Well, last review I saw of a Windows ARM notebook, they found the x86 emulation was 32-bit only... not 16-bit so those odd 16-bit installers and such would not run, not 64-bit so the more and more common 64-bit-only apps would not run either. Emulation was apparently pretty slow, a big problem when virtually every application is compiled for x86 or x86-64.

    I would guess the big trouble with Windows Server on ARM would be the number of applications that would NOT be ARM-native (I wonder what fraction of the stuff like domain control and etc. built into windows server is even ported to ARM as opposed to emulated?) You'd rapidly blow any power savings (and any chance of reasonable performance) if you're running much emulated code.