Microsoft CPU anyone?

"Intel falls on report Microsoft plans to design own chips for PCs and servers"

- ... Microsoft plans to design its own chips for its Surface laptops and desktops as well as servers.

- The Microsoft chips are reportedly based on technology from Arm, which Nvidia is in the process of acquiring from Softbank.

- Microsoft said in 2017 that it was working with Arm server makers to optimize silicon for use in its own data centers.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/18/int...ft-will-design-own-chips-for-pcs-servers.html

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Whaddya mean my CPU now comes with built in telemetry?

 

Tells that iNtel is loosing market shares. They failed to innovate the CPU and now AMD is beating them and soon M$ will no longer need iNtel that could only spell disaster for them. iNtel for a long time forgot to innovate and market affordable CPU and now sees the fruits of their failed labor come back to bite them in the butts.

 

For the past five years I believed AMD with the Zen recovery would be the immediate threat to Intel but ARM I felt would be the long term threat/competition to both Intel/AMD (x86 as a whole), in terms market share. Another big example aside from MS and Apple is Amazon which owns Annapurna Labs which also produces ARM chips like the AWS Graviton. (Some may have heard of Amazon's Annapurna due to the stock ARM Cortex A15 chips they made for the Netgear R9000 router in 2016).

Going vertical for companies like MS, Apple and others means, aside from cutting out the middle man and saving money, they can more tightly integrate hardware and software to be more seamless, the down side in the long run I can see is there could be a chance it pushes DIY builds to a corner if there are certain instruction sets, modules or coprocessors that are unique to custom implements by MS, Apple etc that are needed for their OSs to perform ideally or be fully functional.

 

Intel's failure caused a lot of shake up.

A lot of tangential points below but I just want to post it anyways...

The one thing which M1 is made for and built for is as per my reasoning is - Apple Mac OS marketshare is around 10% world wide. And their Mac based revenue stream is 9.x% last time I checked. And they have been in so many issues of VRM heatup, processor throttling and all sorts of drama. On top you see the T1 and T2 chips in Macs, those are called so called co-processors which handle everything except the x86 code, they use that to maintain that "Privacy first" their Dogma. A blackbox security system which has all that "Security Enclave" nonsense. So when Intel's x86 processors were not being able to thin their garbage macs down Apple decided it. When they are funneling millions of dollars into TSMC R&D for 7nm and up, it made no sense on the HW side to pay x amount to Intel to create these Chips for Apple. They even make PCIe lane changes to Mac Intel machines, the DMI 3.0 is saturated at x4 afaik the Macs have x8 link. Which is what we will be seeing in Z590 RKL, and they still sue eDRAM on Die, which we do not see on Consumer side. Maybe Intel felt the more pins and socket changes for that which literally gives them more performance in gaming, maybe is too much to change all the production lines for XCC (XEON top end) and HCC (HEDT to probably Mainstream Z now ?) and LCC (it used to be Mainstream Z series now it's mid range), so why needed just rehash the 1151 and make them obsolete (Z390 really never deserved to be obsolete socket..rest it was always the case but I digress) So yeah thin and light with ARM and software translation works well for Apple to make this shift.

And when you look at the Software side and the consumer base. Who uses Macs for Server class workloads and other heavy lifting ? I do not see them in Universities which are running sophisticated equipment or the WETA or such studios which do high compute intense CGI. ILM at Disney is one of the best studios, I don't think they use Macs. So who use them, their loyal consumer base. I heard that Gatekeeper in mac went some big changes and Apple removed 32bit support which killed a lot of games running on that OS as well. So yeah the OS Software stack userbase is Music producers and Art creators and maybe PS and etc work. So Apple could handle that ARM translation esp when they pay millions for MS and Adobe to create First Party class optimized products for their OS.


Markets
Amazon is always about more independence and strong arm of techno dominance conglomerate which wants to control everything, Bezos is like even a rat's home like Jerry's from Tom and Jerry he would monetize it lol. Annapurna labs was such thing, they even now want to make their own AI chips moving away from Nvidia, they currently have Havana labs (Intel bought them) AI chips. Their Graviton was for low end stack to save a lot of money, so Graviton 2 got more of that now.

Now we see Google trying to ape Apple since first Pixel to latest one (Pixel OG - iPhone 6 clone, Pixel 2 removed jack but was unique, P3 - World's worst notch, P4 - Tried to hide the shame but overpriced, P5 - none cares ?), they aped for 5 generations and their marketshare in North America is under 3% less than Huawei's Honor even after Blacklisted. That level of joke we are talking gents. So they are also now apparently wanting to make their own crap. M$ also wants to do that lol, every dog wants to do their own chips. M$ couldn't save Nokia and Windows Phone and now Windows10 but yah sure go ahead and make your own garbage. SQ2 Qcomm based ARM processor or whatever x86 based junk they put in that trash called Surface won't be able to run any OS other than Win10 for sure. Chromebook also same, everyone just dreams on that Apple dream and copy heavily yet fail harder, they never learn from mistakes.

Remember, ARM is always custom. People say it's amazing wonderful and all. Without Qualcomm CAF on Android the Qcomm processors won't see proper support from Development community, yes it;s less than 1% of the worldwide who use custom ROM or unlock BL and etc. But still it has a lot going, as for Mediatek its against GNU GPL v2, Xiaomi and other Chinese OEMs are hard for modding and development, so it is always custom. Need the OEM Kernel src along with Drivers for Baseband and other components, the bootchain of Qcomm has become very complicated after 800 here's more info (Lineage OS webpage). So making Server and HPC on ARM also is similar. Linux on ARM exists but I personally feel getting ARM HW which is specialized esp like the new Altera's processor which is trying to challenge EPYC7742 needs a special compilation and lots of work. Only AMZN and MSFT can handle that, but this is MS we are talking about they are really unfit expect for making money with as a Service scams, they do not have Apple's experience with ARM processors.

ARM for DIY won't happen. ARM on servers itself is not happening because Dell/EMC and HP, Lenovo do not make the big rack machines to buy for these companies for the ARM products. Qcomm killed entire Centriq which was full custom chip server that was made for DC market and Cloudflare was on top of marketing but it all fizzeled out, Qcomm is not a company that wastes R&D it reaps tons of that with Patents but they killed it because there was less money worth that. AMD won't lose, they are having Samsung and TSMC to help with their goals. As for Intel I do not know, how can a company fail so bad with over 98% of marketshare, it's now 90%, 5% eaten by AMD and others are ARM and custom. Their 10nmSF is also having yield issues damn. So yeah Intel will either be forced to innovate or perish.

DIY - So considering everything, that I see nowadays WaaS, SaaS, GaaS and all sorts of junk we are going to old age era of IBM machines for elites. Centralization of the computing, anti thesis of what Microsoft during Windows 98, XP, Win7 stood for. It's just the technocracy dominance. Oil is no more enough powerful to leverage, Data is. Even Google is at OPEC and etc.. So yeah, I just think for now until the lithography nodes are not extinct we will have control. With ARM forget it, the Windows OS has superb backwards compat ofc MS wants to break it by adding UWP, Certificate based driver blocks, WaaS, Spyware, Anti Win32 (Project Reunion, the unholy abomination) and etc trash like DX12 WDDM compliance for games. And gaming being a big backbone of this industry, along with DC, HPC which is powered by x86. I do not see it in any viable form. With all the sockets, standards we are used to and Enterprise. It's too much of a weight to move. Glad that it is like that I can run any x86 code on my machine unlike the BS gated Apple utopia.

 

More info "surfacing" [ pun intended ]

"Microsoft Designing Its Own Chips for Servers, Surface PCs"

- Microsoft Corp. is working on in-house processor designs for use in server computers that run the company’s cloud services, adding to an industrywide effort to reduce reliance on Intel Corp.’s chip technology.

- The world’s largest software maker is using Arm Ltd. designs to produce a processor that will be used in its data centers, according to people familiar with the plans.

- It’s also exploring using another chip that would power some of its Surface line of personal computers.

- Microsoft’s efforts are more likely to result in a server chip than one for its Surface devices, though the latter is possible, said one of the people

- Microsoft has stepped up hiring of processor engineers in recent years, recruiting in the backyard of chipmakers such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Nvidia Corp. and among those cut adrift when Qualcomm Inc. abandoned its server chip efforts.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...n-chips-for-servers-surface-pcs?sref=aGTrSb9U

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Besides making their processors better, faster, more energy efficient, will intel decide on its own operating system down the line? intel may find themselves on the outside looking in in the very near future, so it'll be interesting to see what they do next to counter this.

 

As for the Apple-Intel story, a former Intel engineer François Piednoël mentioned that there were major issues with Skylake Quality Assurance and he believes that was probably a turning point, aside from that stagnation architecture wise and broken promises of lower power consumption probably didn't help either. Makes sense to have all aspects of a product in your control and go vertical if it suits your needs. Sucks for consumer freedom but from their perspective less money wasted and they don't need to work around Intel designing a product.

ARM I think will do fine on servers starting at the low end and moving up, yeah a few hiccups here and there maybe on the way. As for vendor locks, companies including Dell/EMC already are starting to resort to vendor locking the EPYC CPUs in their servers for improved security. Despite AMD having some great and competitive/class leading products (nice that Zen 3 moved to 8 core CCX), Intel right now is still seeing so much demand that they actually are saturating their own fabs and looking at TSMC to offload some of that demand. TSMC on the other hand at the moment is actually looking to cut some of the wafer allocation from AMD for other vendors. Apple secured 80% of TSMCs 5nm production for next year. One of the reasons AMD may face increasing manufacturing costs.

As for backwards compatibility between ARM and x86 as long as a somewhat decently usable translation layer exists for x86 code there's a path for transition, competition or both. Apple is definitely more nimble and can make transitions quicker due to lower market share and legacy business dependencies vs MS but even if slow MS can make it happen in time.

As for software as a service that's where things are moving unfortunately for increased profits not a fan either by any means but makes sense from a business perspective, even if you want to call it a "scam", after all MS is foremost a software and services company. As for MS working on it's own chips, they can build up the experience just like the others through hires and acquisitions.

 

And I think that is where the danger lies. What can the market / people rely on in this new market for Microsoft? Perhaps their past performance with Windows??

The quality and performance of Windows 10 decreases with each new Update. Microsoft 2020 is not the Microsoft of the past. Buggy release after Buggy release, early Security issues in Azure, etc. I for one will not be an early adopter of anything MS CPU bound... but then again if it doesn't run Linux from a DIY point of view, I'm not interested anyway.

 

One of the reasons for Windows 10 QC issues according to a former employee who worked for 15 years was that they cut the amount testing/laying off testers and I assume increased reliance on Windows Insiders, most who like me probably just tested for fun and to see what’s new and didn’t report bugs lol. I saw his video on YouTube last year, I’ll see if I can find it again.

EDIT: Found it!


The other thing is more than W10 their other services/software are getting more focus as that’s where more sales and revenues are coming, the OS itself is no longer the core of their profits and while they’re just putting enough effort to keep it alive and viable it’s just not as much a focus anymore, or seems that way at least. Granted, ironically at the same time W10 for me has actually mostly been pretty stable, more so than 7 in its early days, again just my own experience.

 

While there are some advantages for both the software and hardware coming out of the same house, it also raises anti trust questions, and what chips / privacy / monitoring crap that say Apple /M1, Microsoft and what ever they develop have, etc,etc,etc.

Like, Never buy Facebook devices like the portal..... while they are nice, they are steeling so much information from the privacy of your own home. What is the camera and mic recording that you do not know? We do not have protections against their EULA's,etc and TOS's ,etc...... This will become a big problem and it is already out of hand.

 

Agreed That is also another major concern; hence my comments on the first post... We already know they're adding telemetry to the OS... Who's to say what actual hardware decides it needs to collect, unbeknownst to the end-user.