News ARM adds virtualisation to Cortex A

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/08/25/arm-adds-virtualisation-to-cortex-a/1

 

Competition is always good. I say bring it on ARM.

 

Agree ^

RISC is definitely better for certain situations, where full bloodied x86 is just not necessary.

I think that specialist architectures should continue to be investigated and ARM is making a good start.... Who said that a database server, web server, file server, ERP system, etc. All require the same CPU instruction set? Surely there must be optimised designs?!

Dunno what ever happened to the RISC push, ~15 years ago it was seen as a real revolution (Acorn Archimedes, etc), but it just died away...

Cheers,

SouperAndy

 

Didn't Sun Microsystems try to revive it with their Ultra SPARC's?

 

AFAIK, Microsoft isn't that huge in the server market (is that right?), and linux is known to work well on arm processors, so maybe things will work out.

 

Yep - I used a Sun system in my previous job ~5 years ago and used a PowerPC based supercomputer to run simulations... But you wouldn't call them 'mainstream' or even enterprise in any real sense.

Any large (non-IT) corporation that is currently looking at a server farm / datacentre will be AMD / Intel x86 all the way.

It seems that at the moment, everything upto specialised applications (HPC, etc) will get x86 by default.

Cheers,

SouperAndy

 

Don't believe everything posted here from the Linux brigade. Microsoft does just fine in the world market and IS the major player they all look to.

Just read the waffle that follows this now and you will understand my post.

 

I don't really see ARM gaining any kind of significant server market share until it there is a 64bit ARM instruction set.

 

Go ARM!

Didn't you run a story last month about how ARM were looking to completely remove themselves from manufacture and just sell licenses to their IPs? Not sure how that would affect any push to usurp Intel or AMD.

Anywho, hard to care when my shares are heading up like they're made of helium

 

If by "The major player they all look to" you mean 1% of market share in Server OS, then yes.

Honestly I wonder if this isn't actually bad news for AMD. If ARM becomes a real competitor to Intel it's going to be taking more business away from AMD than anyone else.

 

That is a little skewed as the linked article is talking about Linux vs Windows in an HPC environment of the top 500 Super Computers. I would guess (and probably be fairly accurate) that Linux vs Windows in the Majority of Non Super Computer datacenters (typical business) actually run a fairly even mix, not to say that Linux isn't higher percentage than Windows (the one I run is almost 50/50), but I don't have the numbers to check in front of me. I suppose I could check Gartner to find out their stats for the average data center, but eh.

 

I'm looking forward to running ARM in a future desktop/server system I can't wait to see how these little beasts perform. If they also add support for PCIe and other common interfaces in x86 land, I can't see how people could not want to use them with a server system. Unless the mainboards are really expensive or so.

On a sidenote, it's important to realize that the entire ARM business including ARM Inc itself and licensees dwarfs Intel by a few orders of magnitude. If ARM does something, you bet Intel is paying attention.

 

You should really read what you link to. The only people pushing Linux are linux fanbois, the business world is run on Microsoft Server based OS. The top 500 supercomputers in the world are specific to its needs and not to the small companies with 1 server and 10 desktop pcs.

 

uh.... no.

even mac has its place in the server world. small companies that can't afford the time to find someone skilled with linux will use windows for their servers, and companies that rely only windows-only software will go for windows servers, but windows is a horrible os to use for a server. its bloated, incredibly limiting (to mainly cpu architectures and customization), NTFS is slow as hell compared to ext4 (especially on SSDs), and most of all, windows is not stable enough. also, you ALWAYS have to pay a price for windows whereas linux can be free.

 

Right. And I assume you have proof for all these claims?

Also, everybody knows that BSD > Linux when it comes to server tasks, if only because Linux is an insecure pile of remote exploits