Microsoft moves to proprietary processors
The alliance between Microsoft and Intel has always set standards for the entire computer industry, but times are slowly beginning to change. Microsoft is not very happy with the pace of development of modern server processors, and therefore decided to start experimenting with FPGA chips in order to achieve better performance in servicing their search engine Bing.
The manufacturer of FPGA chips is Altera, a pioneer in the field of programmable chips. The pilot testing involved 1632 servers, each of which was equipped with a classic x86 Intel Xeon processor and a motherboard with an FPGA chip. The boards were combined into a single machine search network called Catapult, through which requests from the Bing website went, bypassing the Xeon processors.
This architecture has been able to prove its viability, ensuring the acceleration of the processing of requests up to 40 times compared with the architecture that uses only x86-processors. However, not all requests succumbed to the transfer of processing to FPGA, therefore, no rejection is planned from classic processors. On average, Doug Berger, a Microsoft Research engineer in charge of this project, expects a performance gain of at least twice, which is clearly less impressive figures. However, Doug sees another FPGA advantage — the ability to reconfigure them as Bing’s capabilities grow.
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By the way, Microsoft is not the only one trying to find an alternative to x86-processors, Facebook and Google are exploring the possibility of using ARM processors in their servers.
The manufacturer of FPGA chips is Altera, a pioneer in the field of programmable chips. The pilot testing involved 1632 servers, each of which was equipped with a classic x86 Intel Xeon processor and a motherboard with an FPGA chip. The boards were combined into a single machine search network called Catapult, through which requests from the Bing website went, bypassing the Xeon processors.
This architecture has been able to prove its viability, ensuring the acceleration of the processing of requests up to 40 times compared with the architecture that uses only x86-processors. However, not all requests succumbed to the transfer of processing to FPGA, therefore, no rejection is planned from classic processors. On average, Doug Berger, a Microsoft Research engineer in charge of this project, expects a performance gain of at least twice, which is clearly less impressive figures. However, Doug sees another FPGA advantage — the ability to reconfigure them as Bing’s capabilities grow.
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By the way, Microsoft is not the only one trying to find an alternative to x86-processors, Facebook and Google are exploring the possibility of using ARM processors in their servers.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/226665/
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