Windows Weekly 508: ARM Yourself

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• nbplopes

  10 March, 2017 - 4:44 am

  <p>Today its not just about performance independently of anything else. We moved on from the need of more performance regardless of energy consumption to the conscious need of good performance per watt. When you maintain a large Cloud infrastructure, energy consumption is a challenge and is definitely a visible cost. Heck its a visible cost even for personal users, consider changing your house lightning to LED and you will definitely see the difference in the bill. The same for computing.</p><p>Its natural that MS is introducing ARM systems in its Azure infrastructure first. The customer will be running code on ARM without even knowing it. I hope these costs saving are somewhat reflected in the price, allowing users to choose between Intel or Arm in Azure considering a lot of products are VM based.</p><p>The list that MS sees ARMs being good at, it is pretty much almost everything core in Cloud Platform services. Leaving aside cloud services that focus on providing user terminals to replace their desktops with Windows VMs, VMWare style amongst other things for now.</p><p>Almost all major versions of Linux servers already support ARM.</p><p>Will see. But I suspect that this move coincides with a break through in ARM chip design meeting performance at least close to Xeon 5 levels if not better (mid range Intel servers), while leading the performance per watt bandwagon.</p><p>Couple this with some pressure on Intel , this move looks poised to be a Win Win scenario for Microsoft Azure.</p><p>EDIT: It makes sense to keep ARM / Windows server support for Azure only . It can give a certain edge to Azure when compared to its contenders. But only if there is cost savings for customers, if not it will provide no edge at all but internal cost savings on metal and energy.</p>

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