Data Centers are an integral component for the functioning of your most favorite platform on the interwebs. But, the maintenance of these locations, full of loads of power-hogging server racks, is a tedious task. Qualcomm is looking to introduce a major change in the server industry by powering these racks with power-efficient ARM-based chips. And Microsoft is supporting the change by building an optimized version of Windows Server to run on these chips.
Announced at the Open Compute Summit, Qualcomm announced that it’s extending its partnership with Microsoft with the release of server specifications based on the latest version of Microsoft’s Project Olympus. It is an open-source hardware design for data centers, which was unveiled in October last year. This architecture is based on Qualcomm’s 10-nanometer Centriq 2400 processor, which has a 48-core server processor packed into it.
Ram Peddibhotla, Vice President of product management, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies (QDT) said,
Our collaboration with Microsoft and contribution to the OCP (open compute project) community enables innovations such as Qualcomm Centriq 2400 to be designed in and deployed into the data centers rapidly. In collaborating with Microsoft and other industry leading partners, we are democratizing system design and enabling a broad-based ARM server ecosystem.
As per the official release, they have been working together on making ARM-based server enablement possible for several years now. Qualcomm has been working onsite with Microsoft to develop an optimized version of Windows Server. The optimized software will be employed for internal use in its data centers running the aforementioned Centriq 2400 platform.
If these tests are successful then it would help facilitate rapid ARM adoption into other data centers. Though it is currently restricted to Microsoft’s data center, Qualcomm mentions this partnership will also span “multiple future generations of hardware, software, and systems.”full-fledged Windows 10Windows 10 Cloud Also, Microsoft is currently trying to build a version, possibly , that is capable of running on Qualcomm’s ARM-based Snapdragon 835 chips.
Commenting on their partnership, Dr. Leendert van Doorn, distinguished engineer, Microsoft Azure says,
Our joint work on Windows Server for Microsoft’s internal use, and the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Open Compute Motherboard server specification, compatible with Microsoft’s Project Olympus, is an important step toward enabling our cloud services to run on QDT-based server platforms.
This development is a significant stride in the right direction and could spell danger for widely known American chipmaker Intel. The backend infrastructure for the server (or data center) ecosystem is almost completely controlled by the latter. But, Qualcomm may be the one to dethrone the giant by seeing a fledgling demand for its ARM-based server architecture.
The chipmaker is currently sampling small quantities of these ARM server chips to its partners for testing but plans to make it widely available by the end of this year. It is currently looking to gain some validation about the capabilities of the said server chip before the tech giants start boosting their cloud architecture using the same. And you already know who’ll be the first one to enjoy the benefit of this back-end technology.
