[Info-vax] Microsoft On ARM Failure (was Re: VSI licensing policy (again))

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-09-23 15:17:50 +0000, Dave Froble said:

> My question is, "why"?
> 
> x86 is cheap.
> x86 is everywhere.
> 
> What reason would Microsoft have to look at anything else?

Price and power efficiency, same as usual. Arm can be cheaper, more 
power-efficient, and fast.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd/9 


Arm designs can also be juggernaut-scale, with 15 billion transistors 
in one recent design; with fast big.LITTLE multiprocessor, a fast GPU, 
statistics-math acceleration; that's a full-on SoC.  And 
power-efficient. For comparison, Itanium Poulson and Kittson are ~3 
billion. And Alpha and Itanium processors and servers never really saw 
appreciable work on power efficiency.

As for being "everywhere", the Arm installed base dwarfs those of Intel 
and AMD and x86-64. And I'd suspect that Arm-related investments dwarf 
Intel, too.

Intel has spectacular processor design and processor fabrication 
abilities, but they're also necessarily working within a massive 
software installed base, and with a complex and accreted architecture. 
And their fabrication efforts have been falling short. TSMC and others 
have massive investments in fabrication, as well. Intel has discussed 
using TMSC to fab parts of some Intel-designed components.

https://www.reuters.com/business/intel-details-mixed-source-chip-strategy-tsmc-partnerships-2021-08-19/ 


Microsoft has been selling Arm clients for a while, and publicly 
prototyping Arm servers for several years now, as have others. How far 
Microsoft might get with Windows 11 for ARM64? There are a number of 
folks working with the Windows ARM64 insiders' preview, including 
having gotten that working on Apple M1.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/28/announcing-arm64ec-building-native-and-interoperable-apps-for-windows-11-on-arm/ 


How? If? When? Unknown. Architectural and product transitions tend to 
be boring and slow and happening only around the periphery of other 
markets, then the platforms and tools are ready, and then the changes 
can then accelerate through the market.




-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC