At that point you've burned the other company so many times by changing at the last minute that it becomes hard to get real support and engagement where you actually need it.

Has that ever been the case yet, for ARM servers?

There's no "magic" in ARM. The reduced power comes from the reduced complexity. Heck, branch prediction is fairly new in ARM. I have trouble seeing a time when an Intel chip will ever fall behind even a bucket full of ARM chips, unless workloads ever fall near zero.

Intel's designs, being tuned for high sequential performance, are significantly better for that purpose; but if you look at VPS services which currently only get a fraction of a CPU each, I'm sure they could run more power-efficiently with a larger fraction of a punier CPU.

For example, Jim Keller estimates a fully developed arm chip will be 15-30% more efficient than an equivalent x86. Now, this development hasn't happened yet, but with giants like Qualcomm, it will happen eventually.

Besides, never doubt the word of jim keller ;)

> QDT has been working with Microsoft for several years on ARM-based server enablement and has onsite engineering at Microsoft to collaboratively optimize a version of Windows Server, for Microsoft’s internal use in its data centers, on Qualcomm Centriq 2400-based systems. QDT’s OCP submission is the result of a multi-faceted, multi-level engagement between the two companies to facilitate ARM adoption into the data center. It encompasses multiple areas of hardware and software including board development, firmware, operating system, compilers and tools, and CoreCLR.

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2017/03/08/qualcomm-c...

Also, I doubt Microsoft went through the trouble of supporting full x86 programs on Qualcomm's ARM chips just to improve the relationship with Intel. If anything, finally bringing ARM to not just servers, but Windows notebooks is what will make Intel even angrier with Microsoft.

So far, the main reason why ARM couldn't enter the PC market was the Windows lock-in - if x86 programs wouldn't work on ARM, then they had no chance (save for UWP apps gaining huge popularity, which hasn't happened yet, and I don't expect to happen for at least a few more years, if ever).

Keep the x86 CPU around for active, high powered use, and then use a low power ARM CPU to run downloads and software updates while the PC is in an off or idle state.

Literally any ARM chip. What ARM chip do you think makes a fitting replacement for a high performance Intel core in a Macbook?

The ARM server ecosystem has been in the works for a few years. TechCon'16 we saw the announcement that the software is fully there: and this is not hype, all major distributions support all the major players out of the box. Download ISO, install, and use it.

HW-wise we are now in the 3rd gen of chips (QC Centriq, XGene3, ThunderX2) all of which compare with E5, not Atoms. First/Second gen were mostly proving grounds for the specs and software work, excepting for Cavium machines, which have some serious network I/O where the relative wimpyness of any one of the 96 cores simply doesn't matter for certain workloads. In a matter of two years we've seen private datacenters soak up XGene2 and Cavium chips. We've seen ODMs and OEMs get their shit together and start selling real kit (b2b.gigabyte.com).

It's funny, people expect these things to suddenly appear overnight everywhere and competitive with E7s and Power9. It takes decades, but the server guys managed to fit in nicely in about 5 years. I am excited.

What ARM will bring is competitive market and no Intel Tax. Average 1U in ARM will be massively cheaper. For servers OpenPOWER is more interesting[1]

[1]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/07/open_power_summit_p...

I stand corrected. It's been a time since I've looked at the performance. I didn't realize they caught up so quickly.

Since MS is mostly "behaving" themselves, Valve is keeping SteamOS around, but not focusing on it.

At least for now... (it wouldn't surprise me if MS became more aggressive in their W10+DX12+"Xbox everywhere"+"MS Store" push...)

Most of the issue revolves around GPU drivers, which in theory valve is not responsible for, but they have hired devs to work on the open source AMD drivers. Even then, most devs don't optimize for OpenGL. That's again on the dev, and not valve, unless valve is going to provide devs to every game developer out there to provide linux support. Vulkan (hopefully) would resolve that, as optimizing vulkan builds makes games run better everywhere.

Of course they aren't putting ALL their eggs in this basket. ~90% of their revenue comes from windows, so they should be putting most of their effort into windows support. You can't lose your current customers while trying to make the future better. The fact that they are in fact fixing things and hiring driver devs is a great sign. And I believe they provided the rocket league dev too?

Either way, progress is coming, slow and steady. linux as a primary gaming platform works just fine for me, thanks to valve.

Confirmed by a happy occasional CS:GO player here.

Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, specially Microsoft, go the extra mile to make sure games perform well on their platforms, even special casing APIs for specific games.

Valve isnt trying to discourage devs from using windows. Windows is still their main income source. Linux only devs aren't going to make valve money during the transition to windows. The goal is to build the game library on linux so it is a valid competitor.

Also, they can't really make a ton of special OS level APIs, since they are trying to keep things generic. they dont want to fork Linux, they want to maintain compatibility. I mean, open is the entire premise of leaving windows. And if you mean higher level APIs, there's things like: https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/ one of the top things in porting a game, is that directX covers more than just graphics. opengl + SDL2 covers most of it. steam audio makes it so you can write code once and have it work everywhere.

So yeah, they are working on making APIs that make it easier for devs to release linux/SteamOS games without needing the player base already there, because linux "just works" with the middleware.

The short of it is: they are actively doing a lot of stuff to advance linux gaming still, just a lot of it is behind the scenes now and aimed at devs or not directly steam related (you dont see the fact that they hire mesa devs through steam updates).

When one attends GDC, they have booths were they give support directly to customers, they also fly-in to relevant studios to sort out any kind of performance or bug related problems they might be facing.

And the point still stands that this is a future investment for them. They aren't pushing to make linux exclusive, they are pushing to make linux viable. Valve has ~360 employees. Linux has a ~1% gaming market share. If valve has even 4 employees working on Linux, they are essentially scaling their effort based on current income from the platform, whereas Sony/Microsoft get 100% of their income from a singular platform, so they spend 100% of their expenses on building that platform. If valve switched over and said "ok, all employees full bore on SteamOS, ignore windows", they would lose a LOT of money. Besides, the goal here isn't to make SteamOS "their" platform, they goal is to make gaming work on an open platform. Microsoft has to entice people with support in order to keep them locked in to their garden, Valve is trying to unlock the garden (to an extent).

if they want growth, they should spend more than just 1% on the platform, but people are acting like they are spending 0% on the platform. It's still improving and actively being worked on, but this is a big undertaking for a team of 4, OS updates, dev support, steam client, etc etc... And if the team is bigger than 4, then they are in fact spending more than 1% on a 1% market segment, which still proves the point of "they havent abandoned it, its just not growing at the 'right' pace in publicly obvious ways"

Windows also runs on arbitrary hardware

Any sources to back up this claim? 10% performance hit compared to what? Windows? A different Linux distro?

I've found that for native games, Linux can actually offer better performance in many cases than the Windows version.

Someone also did a test recently (full video on Youtube) with the Windows version of the new Doom running on Linux through the WINE emulation (yes I know its not technically an emulator) via Vulkan and the performance exceeded the Windows version.

This isn't necessarily valve's fault though. It's because the devs will shit out a Linux build without even trying to run it or they just don't care.

Some games work great. Some don't work at all and shouldn't even be listed with Linux support.

I sincerely hope Linux takes off as a viable gaming platform. All the tools and components are there. The only thing missing at the moment is developer mindshare.

There are some problems and glitches unrelated to the games, in my experience (like how newer nvidia GPUs have screen tearing on Ubuntu -- unrelated to vsync, by the way -- and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it for the time being)

Ah, here it is. From https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/3snvpc/steamo...

"took a quick peek at the latest Geekbench executable for Linux(3.3.2,) it was compiled with GCC 4.4.3 on Ubuntu 10.04 - a 5 and a half year old compiler. Windows version was compiled with MSVC 2012 update 4 released 2 years ago."

Take note: That ars article was done ~15 months ago (november 2015). In it, they used Ubuntu 10.04, which was released in April of 2010 (thus '10.04')! Steam wasn't even released on Linux, until nearly 3 years later, in 2013!

That article is so BS that you should ignore it outright. It's not even fit to be toilet paper.

Borderlands 2, for example, plays fine for me on a i7 930, with a GTX 570. An older rig.

Dota 2 with OpenGL rendering hits or exceeds the Windows FPS when run on Linux.

Switch to Vulkan though and it craters.

Source engine games with OpenGL rendering often outperform Windows.

nah, not really, only dota2, because has no wrapper, at least for valve's source games.

Isn't that the core market?

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-just-added-the-best-way-of...

https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/28/windows-10-will-soon-blo...

Then get meeting scheduled with IBM and Oracle. Talk to the VAR or OEM guy in your office with your POWER mug poorly hidden. Start asking questions about TPC benchmarks and error correction. Ask if you can pay for cores only when you need peak capacity.

Intel will provide them with marketing support, potentially very significant if they care about you. Microsoft will also bend over backwards for an Oracle compete opportunity.

https://www.velocityreviews.com/threads/intel-and-dell-scum-...

Dell did eventually start shipping servers with AMD processors in them, but it was long after they first started saying "We may start selling AMD based servers."

Microsoft and Exchange was a great example. Doing things like running big mailboxes, having HA services, and doing discovery were ridiculous hacks until Exchange Online came around and subjected them to the pain.

Similarly, I'm sure Microsoft has plenty of idle servers sitting around doing very little that could easily be running more effectively on ARM.

Intel has improved power management, but their low-end chips suck.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/07/open_power_summit_p...

The real question is if WSL (Ubuntu for Windows) will be available for AArch64 Windows. Because the only real 64-bit ARM software ecosystem today is Linux (courtesy of Linaro, Redhat, Canonical, Suse, and ARM).

Between WSL and BTing legacy 32-bit x86 apps this could be a decent offering for folks who already have Microsoft infrastructure. Even cooler if Hyper-V is ported.