Microsoft Benchmarks Upcoming AMD Milan-X CPU | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Benchmarks Upcoming AMD Milan-X CPU

techcommunity.microsoft.com

46 pointsDeathArrow31 comments

I was coming here to say: "Windows has an insignificant (actually 0% for a few years) market in top500. It is not a good benchmark for a processor with such a big number of cores.". Then was surprised to see that it was run in CentOS.

It is a shame that many sites didn't behaved like this when Threadripper was launched and basically said that the architecture was inefficient at using so many cores or the software simply was not ready yet. Phoronix was one of the few which did it right.

Azure is the new darling "OS" for Microsoft, we are back into the mainframe/UNIX server days anyway.

Besides third party distributions, Microsoft now has three flavours of their own as well.

Azure Sphere OS, CBL-Mariner, then their Android flavours (althought it isn't really Linux) and RTOS like Azure RTOS.

Still owns the desktop, but since the internal political wars for the ultimate GUI framework started, I have started to doubt where it will all end.

> the internal political wars for the ultimate GUI framework started

Any more info about this?

Easy, Windows Forms, WPF, WinRT/UAP/UWP with WinUI 2.x, WinUI 3.0 for desktop, Blazor for WebAssembly, but also for web widgets in MAUI, and MAUI naturally.

Then in what concerns XAML, MAUI uses the one from Xamarin, instead of adopting the one from WinUI/UWP.

WinUI 3.0 is supposed to be the future, but has so many bugs and missing features, that Windows 11 is actually using WinUI 2.7 with UWP still.

All of those UIs catering for developer attention, makeing their point why their framework and not the one from another group.

Safest bets now are to stay with Win32, Forms/WPF or go Web.

Hmmm... I know. Thought it was a new war.

Like any major tech company, Microsoft runs a lot of Linux installations. Just because it's Microsoft doesn't mean all they care about is Windows.

After all "linux is communism" and " linux is a cancer" they are very happy with the communist cancer. Makes you wonder.

Very few people will switch from Windows to Linux for any reason, so it's fair to benchmark Threadripper on Windows for customers who are already tied to Windows.

>It is a shame that many sites didn't behaved like this when Threadripper was launched and basically said that the architecture was inefficient at using so many cores or the software simply was not ready yet. Phoronix was one of the few which did it right.

I found it jaw-dropping how badly Microsoft handled that release. In some cases, the best way to improve multithreaded performance under Windows was to disable three quarters of the cores. Meanwhile any decent Linux distro scaled to the full core count out of the box.

I wonder to what extent this is holding back computer architecture. Certainly the Wintel cartel has historically back competition from other architectures, but even within x86-land we can see the monopoly power and technical inadequacy of Windows holding back innovation.

Linux supports every architecture known to man. Microsoft pretty much only supports x86. They have no excuse.

This narrative doesn’t jive with the Windows NT development history and its support for Alpha, PowerPC, etc. As well as Windows CE historical range of processor support.

It is a common view that the "wintel" architecture "monopoly" sucked investment that could feed other more efficient architectures than x86. It is known that NT supported many different architectures, mostly thanks to its VMS heritage, and CE supported POWER and even ARM. But as soon as the desktop became the strongest cash cow, I think other options were kept mostly as lifeboat options.

There are plenty of reasons to be critical of MS, but they sell a lot of ARM machines these days...[1]

1: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/business/surface-pro...

So what ? Surface is a toy for rich people. It is not a real computer.

These are very impressive gains. The era of >GB L3 cache is upon us.

With the current roadmap, we are about 2-3 years away from 256 Core and 1GB L3 Cache.

What I want to see is a new and innovative way to cool these potential 400 - 700W monster tightly packed in a server.

It would be interesting to see a something like a conductive metal monolith and then just bolt the processor boards to one side of it. One side would be flat, the other grooved with coolant flowing down to keep cool.

With the release of this 768MB L3 cache, we're __already__ at 1.5GB L3 cache if you go dual-socket.

> What I want to see is a new and innovative way to cool these potential 400 - 700W monster tightly packed in a server.

I mean, air-conditioning, fans, and water cooling are pretty much the only options. And they all work.

These are only 250W CPUs, so dual-socket into 500W or maybe 750W with the motherboard/RAM/SSDs in there. GPUs are harder to cool, as those are 500W behemoths by themselves, and GPU-servers run 8x GPUs (contrasted against your typical 2x CPU dual-socket setups).

It's good to see Microsoft supports AMD now.

With recent benchmark of M1 family chip, I hope Windows don't support M1 chip, at least for now. I would like to see how AMD and Intel can do to change this performance game.

I don’t think x64 is ever going to backtrack to the power efficiency that arm offers. The real scare is if apple comes out with a new xserve with blades of arm processors.

It's coming. My prediction is Apple will start doing server chips not too long from now, at least for internal use. This is going to be especially important as they emphasize their services more and more over their hardware.

Apple Services aren't the same as their hardware.

Well, no shit. I was pointing out that they're placing more and more importance on being a services company rather than a hardware/product company. As that emphasis on services grows they'll probably switch to their own silicon for their cloud stuff which their services will run on.

And I was making the point they aren't even a player on the services market, regardless what their servers run on.

lol what makes you say that? I'd consider apple TV, apple music, apple maps, etc all as services. What is your definition of "services" and do the ones I listed fall into your definition.

When did Microsoft not "support" AMD CPUs?

It truly would not make any difference if Microsoft "supported" the M1 CPU, as Apple does not sell it to anyone without the rest of Apple computer attached to it. I mean, you can run Windows VMs on M1 computers now, with something like Parallels. But perhaps not more directly, as with Boot Camp?

> I would like to see how AMD and Intel can do to change this performance game

What are you trying to say here? In what way is AMD not "winning" the 64+ core CPU performance game?

> But perhaps not more directly, as with Boot Camp?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dwightsilverman/2021/04/14/you-...

Obviously you have to run ARM Windows, but it’s indeed Windows.

If I understand this article correctly, as of April 2021, you can run Windows on ARM under Parallels virtualization software, which is a Virtual Machine, or VM. So that's not direct to hardware, which I thought Boot Camp was?

Boot Camp is direct on hardware indeed. VMs cover a significant proportion of the gap however.

K6 ? AFAIK "Wintel " is not a joke. MS only cares about intel.

Don't you know AMD64? Microsoft's AMD64 adoption makes Intel to support IA-32e.

AMD has been the supplier for XBox console CPUs for a while now.

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