I don't think Microsoft is the real problem there, though.
NT was developed to be portable and was working on architectures other than x86 in the beginning.
So it was interesting when I heard things about "Windows on ARM" half a decade ago--and then the Surface RT. The RT was crap, but it did have real Windows NT working on non-Intel ARM, as was the OS on their Windows Series 10 phones or whatever.
So Microsoft is already there on an OS level. It's the big software vendors that have to be corralled to switch somehow (Autodesk, Adobe, etc.) Honestly .NET overall was probably at least in part Microsoft trying to get developers on something more CPU-agnostic to reduce dependence on x86.
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> So it was interesting when I heard things about "Windows on ARM" half a decade ago--and then the Surface RT. The RT was crap, but it did have real Windows NT working on non-Intel ARM, as was the OS on their Windows Series 10 phones or whatever.
In this specific case, Microsoft is the real problem: Microsoft deeply locked down the Surface RT; you needed a jailbreak to run unsigned applications on it.
To give some context (this started with Windows Server 2003 64-bit and is still how it works in Windows 11): Instead of implementing fat binaries like OS X did, they decided to run old x86 applications in a virtualized filesystem where they see different files in the same logical path. This results in double the DLL hell nightmare, with lots of confusing issues around which process sees which file where. For many usecases around plugins, this made a gradual transition impossible. (Case in point: The memory hungry Visual Studio is currently still 32-bit. Next release will hopefully finally make the switch.)
Also, it’s surprising how much stuff in Windows depends on loading unknown DLLs into your process, like showing the printer dialog. So you run into these problems all the time.
Have they learned their lesson? It doesn’t look like it. Last I checked, x86 on ARM uses the exact same system as x86 on x86-64. If they ever emulate x86-64 the same way, that’s triple DLL hell right there. And I don’t think they’ll get a decade to sort things out this time around.
Microsoft has the capacity to realize that the value of Windows is not the codebase, but the compatibility. They could let the Linux subsystem swallow Windows and wrap Windows itself inside it.
However, I believe we’ll continue to see their colocation system instead, where Windows and Linux are both wrapped inside a system managing both.
Windows might be fully Linux under the hood one day!
WSL2 is one of the early bridges across the divide.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/28/announ...
I believe this is for make applications like DAW (that often uses native plugins, some aren't updated well) port to ARM.
NT itself yes, but the userland? Not in the slightest. Apple provided Rosetta runtime translation at each arch transition, MS did not. As a result, no company even thought about switching PCs over to ARM which meant that there also was no incentive for the big players you mentioned to port their software over to RT.
Windows performance on these platforms is so trash, you feel like going back ten years on ultrabooks. Even their own apps are not optimized or some like visual studio didnt even run.
Compare that to x86 builtin emulation on apple m1, it performs so close to native performance on a 1000 bucks macbook air.
Microsoft has definitely different priorities like how to chnange settings for a user without their permissions or how to hide settings so users have less choice. windows experience has been so downhill since win7.
You cant be user friendly, private first luxury appliance and data-driven add sell-out at the same time.
One dream has to die for the fish to fry.
It is kind of a wild state of affairs that as good a chip as M1 isn't available as commodity hardware.
edit: really, I’m just waiting for Graviton 2 Fargate support, and then I’ll be able to move a lot of workloads.
I agree a truly open-source option would be desirable.
This does not mean RISC-V use wouldn't be a good thing, as it prevents a whole boatload of legal issues, but it just isn't what a lot of people seem to think it is.
ARM could end up being a better ISA in the very high-clock high-IPC domain, it remains to be seen.
If someone wants to compete with Intel they would have a hard time even if they make an excellent processor since they are unlikely to get a x86 license. With arm you have to pay licensing fee and control of the Isa is still with a private company.
With risc v you can make your own processor and have a good shot in market. You will also have a chance to have a to propose/comment on future ISA changes.
None of the server parts have that. But by the time you do run your code on an Arm server, most of the bugs will be worked out.
The M1 is special.
Fortunately, only a handful of companies have the resources to do that.
Unfortunately for Intel, those handful of companies are the biggest and only customers for large scale server farms.
Maybe in 5 or 10 years, ARM will be viable. But by then, we'll all be rocking RISC-V CPUs because someone realized that accelerating for specialized workloads isn't a crock of shit when 90% of your workload is video decoding.
And that M1 only looks as good as it does because of Apple's de facto monopoly on TSMC 5nm. That AMD cores are more than competitive at the same node.
As long as the ARM-community is fragmented, their research/investments won't really be as aligned as Xeon and/or EPYC servers.
HiFive / RISC-V aren't anywhere close to the server-tier.
Graviton is a standard N1 neoverse core, which is slightly slower than a Skylake Xeon / Zen2 EPYC. There's hope that N2 will be faster, but even if it is, we don't really have an apples-to-apples comparison available (since Amazon doesn't sell that chip).
The most likely source of Neoverse cores is the Ampere Altra, which is expected to have N2 cores shipping eventually. As usual though: since Ampere has lower shipping volume than other companies, the motherboards are very expensive.
x86 (both Intel and AMD) have extremely high volumes: so from a TCO perspective, its hard to beat them, especially when you consider motherboard prices into the mix.
Why does this matter? If popular OS distributions consistently target ARM-based CPUs, with a sufficient number of packages (esp. development-support-related) working on them, then who cares about fragmentation? An organization could buy systems with ARM chips and software will basically "just work".
Same argument for consumer PCs, although there you have the MS Windows issue I guess.
The more fragmented your community, the harder it is for software to work consistently across all of them. Intel vs AMD has plenty of obscure issues (see "rr" project, and all the issues getting that debugging tool to work on AMD even though it has the same instruction set).
Sound, WiFi, Ethernet, southbridges, northbridges, PCIe roots. You know, standard compatibility issues that having a ton of SKUs just naturally makes more difficult. Having a "line" of southbridges / consistent motherboards does wonders for compatibility (fix the BIOS/UEFI bug in one motherboard, fix it for all) in Intel/AMD world.
But just as AMD has AMD-specific motherboard bugs, and Intel has Intel-specific motherboard bugs... I'd expect Graviton to have its share of bugs that are inconsistent with Apple M1 or Ampere Altra.
The biggest cost of making chip is the foundry and the foundry ecosystem have reduced the cost to where everyone can be a fabless and just outsource to foundry like TSMC and Samsung.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-build...