The company’s Azure web services continue to explore hardware and software diversity
If 2020 can be notable for any trends in the tech sector, it’s these two: working from home and shunning Intel’s x86 processors. Apple famously and most recently gave Intel the boot in favor of its own M1 system-on-a-chip (SoC). However, Apple didn’t start this trend. Windows on Arm got a big boost very late in 2019 and into early 2020 when Microsoft released the Surface Pro X. Now Redmond is looking at Arm in a different space: the datacenter. According to reports from Bloomberg, Microsoft has been working on its own brand of SoC for servers that it provides as part of its cloud services, including Azure. Arm SoCs with a lot of cores and plenty of PCI Express connectivity can service many concurrent clients at once. Microsoft has begun recruiting chip designers over the last year, reportedly poaching talent from Intel and Qualcomm, among others.
