At the Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, California, today, Microsoft showed off the latest iterations of Project Olympus, its open source data center server design. Until now, the servers in Microsoft’s data centers have all used Intel x86 processors, but now both of those elements – “Intel” and “x86” – have new competition.
In news that’s both surprising and unsurprising, Microsoft demonstrated Windows Server running on ARM processors. Qualcomm and Cavium have both designed motherboards for the Project Olympus form factor that use ARM chips: Qualcomm’s Centriq 2400 processor, a 10nm 48 core part, and Cavium’s ThunderX2 ARMv8-A, with up to 54 cores. In addition to offering lots of cores, both are highly integrated systems-on-chips with PCIe, SATA, and tens of gigabits of Ethernet all integrated.
Intel missed the boat on mobile, and is now feeling pressure from both AMD on desktops and ARM in servers. Great for competition.
“Intel missed the boat on mobile, and is now feeling pressure from both AMD on desktops and ARM in servers. Great for competition”
Competition is great and one of the reasons why I’ve had more AMD desktops than Intel ones since ’98.
But Intel’s been dominating for years and holds 80% of the desktop market and NINETY-NINE % of servers (according to industry stats).
Considering that ARM is NOT a drop-in replacement, I’d say that AMD’s forthcoming Naples arch has a better chance in the server market than does ARM in the near term