Microsoft designs its own Arm chips for data center servers: report

Microsoft is working on its own Arm processor designs for its data center servers, according to a Bloomberg report from December 18. Bloomberg also says Microsoft is considering using another chip that would power some Surface PCs, the report adds.

While some paint this as Microsoft reacts to Apple’s recent decision to roll out its own Arm-based M1 processor, Microsoft and Qualcomm had already partnered since 2019 on Microsoft’s Arm chip that sits inside the Original Surface Pro X.The Pro X 2 uses the SQ2 chip, which is a variant of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx chip without 5G.

The most interesting part for me is that Microsoft uses Arm in the servers. Microsoft had previously worked with Qualcomm and Caviium – with Intel and AMD on Project Olympus, Microsoft’s next-generation cloud hardware design that it supplied to the Open Comput Project. In 2017, Microsoft also announced that it was involved with several ARM vendors, including Qualcomm and Cavium, to get Windows Server to run ARM, but only for its own internal data center.

In 2017, I asked managers if Microsoft would ever make Windows Server on ARM available externally to partners and customers. They said the technology was for internal use only for evaluation of Azure services on Arm servers. But officials noted at the time that they believed Arm servers were good for internal cloud applications such as search and indexing, storage, databases, big data, and business workloads. machine learning.

I asked Microsoft officials about today’s Bloomberg report and got this response from chief corporate officer Frank Shaw:

“With silicon being a fundamental part of the technology, we continue to invest in our own capabilities in areas such as design, manufacturing and tools, while encouraging and strengthening partnerships with a wide range of chip suppliers. .

I found a fairly recent Microsoft job posting that mentions the work Microsoft has going on around ARM64 servers in its data centers. I guess it’s a continuation of what the company announced in 2017.

From this post:

“With the growth of our data centers, we are always looking for new hardware and software solutions to meet our scale and customer demand. The Azure New Technology (ANT) team envisions future cloud technologies, both hardware and software, and we are investigating and enabling them for our use in our data center. A good example of what we are doing is developing and deploying 64-bit ARM servers in our data centers. This is a multi-year effort that consists of extensive partnerships with several silicon companies, including collaboration We are a very hands-on team with deep technical expertise in silicon, systems, operating systems (Windows and Linux) and application stacks. ”

Will Microsoft continue to use Arm servers for internal testing only? Or will they soon start using Arm servers in Azure data centers to run new or existing Azure services.

Another question (or three): Could Microsoft soon follow in AWS’s Gravitron footsteps by making its own custom Arm cores available to its cloud customers soon? I recently asked Microsoft if the company is planning to deliver Apple M1 instances in Azure to customers – similar to what AWS announced earlier this month – and a spokesperson told me, “We we are committed to meeting developers where they are and are still working to expand our offering. We have nothing more to share today. “