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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MostCynical on Thursday July 18 2019, @11:00PM (5 children)
either it isn't any good, or there is no market, and when has MS refused to sell something, even if it sucks?
Therefore, there must be no market.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday July 19 2019, @12:18AM (1 child)
When everything is in the cloud and what you have/need, as a customer, is a bunch of API to interact with your "apps"**, do you really care if they are running on Xeon, I9, AMD or ARM?
The choice of supporting ARM or not is mostly a problem for the cloud-provider - e.g. can *they* drive their cost of "clouding" down and offer cheaper service tiers?
** most of the Azure is SaaS and storage, I doubt anyone in their full mind would choose to "compute" on Windows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @02:59AM
I suppose that depends on which side channel attacks you want to be vulnerable to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @06:03AM (1 child)
Maybe there are no decent server class machines they can put in their machine rooms?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 19 2019, @03:21PM
Maybe there are, but nobody wants Windows on a server.
Have you even seen Windows Server 2016?
I used Windows Server 2008r2. Then Windows Server 2012, which was noticeably slower. Then Windows Server 2016 which is much more noticeably slower. And does almost constant updates. And those updates take much longer than before.
Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 19 2019, @03:19PM
I'll have you know that Microsoft has standards. They will absolutely not sell anything unless they are sure beyond all doubt that it sucks.
Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @08:13PM
gives a shit!
(Score: 1) by hwertz on Saturday July 20 2019, @06:27AM
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.