Just a couple of days ago, Qualcomm and Microsoft sent tech media into a frenzy by announcing Windows Server on ARM. Today, Microsoft fielded questions about the project and how it sees its scope and future.
In an interview with ZDNet"s Mary Jo Foley, a Microsoft spokesperson illuminated that use of Windows Server to ARM64 would be solely for internal use, adding that "innovation inside Microsoft data centers ultimately benefits customers through greater performance and efficiency".
The company played down rumors of differences with its biggest partner in microchips, Intel, claiming "a healthy ecosystem of multiple ARM server vendors ensures active development around technical capabilities". With an established developer and software ecosystem for ARM along with its active development by multiple vendors, the Redmond company believes that servers on ARM are a natural progression for the architecture. This is probably why it is evaluating ARM servers for its internal cloud services in its data centers.
At the recently concluded OCP US Summit, Kushagra Vaid of Microsoft detailed the project:
The project (code-named Olympus) was part of the company"s contribution at the European Digital Infrastructure Summit last year in collaboration with the Open Compute Project (OCP), an organization it joined back in 2014.
Dabbling with the architecture is not new for the company, but with the latest development, it would seem that Microsoft is heating up the ARM"s race.
Source: ZDNet