Microsoft: ARM's eco-circle in data center still needs to be perfected

"Tenkine Server channel January 15 News" Microsoft Data Center Director said will not be the first in their own data center to apply http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13453.html ">arm server, Because the ecosystem of the arm server is still imperfect. While internet providers such as Google are using arm's customization features to reduce operating costs and speed up the processing time for specific tasks, Microsoft is different. Microsoft needs to provide users with large software product lines, most of which run on x86 architecture processors.

If Microsoft uses ARM architecture server, application migration is needed. The cost of this migration is high and there are problems with compatibility and performance. We can see this result with the example of Microsoft's own Surface tablet computer. Arm version of the surface is nothing more than the operation of the original x86 program, resulting in the enterprise users can not promote. The ARM server also encounters this kind of problem, Microsoft's software application mostly only is aimed at the x86 architecture to optimize.

At this point we can see that the arm server in the data center application is still not large-scale deployment. Although Redhat, SuSE and other open source vendors to support the ARM architecture, but without Microsoft to participate in, ARM's application in the data center is still limited to a lightweight workload. AMD said it would launch a 64-bit ARM-architecture processor this year, which would extend the arm's application scenario. But Intel is not watching arm's expansion in the data center, Intel's Low-power products based on the Ling processor have been available, and Intel will launch a more high-performance SOC chip in the future. The advantages of the Intel x86 architecture will be greatly highlighted, and arm's low-power advantage may be defeated by the high compatibility of the x86 architecture.

In the data center market, the contention of Low-power server chips is unavoidable. Who can improve the biosphere to win the market.