Microsoft goes to the processors of its own design

Alliance between Microsoft and Intel have always set the standards for the entire computer industry, but the days slowly begin to change. In Microsoft is not very happy with the pace of development of modern server processors, and therefore decided to start experimenting with chip FPGA, in order to achieve higher productivity in the service of its search engine Bing.





FPGA chip manufacturer is the company Altera, a pioneer in the field of programmable chips. In the pilot test were employed in 1632 servers, each of which was equipped with a classic x86-Intel Xeon processor and motherboard chip FPGA. The boards have been combined into a single search engine network called Catapult, through which were requests from the website Bing bypassing processor Xeon.

This architecture is able to prove its viability, providing acceleration of the processing of queries up to 40 times compared with the architecture that uses only x86-processors. However, not all queries yielded transfer processing on FPGA, so the failure of classical processors are planned. On average, Doug Berger, an engineer who oversees Microsoft Research This project expects productivity gains no less than two times, which is clearly less dramatic tsifry.Tem Still, Doug sees another advantage of FPGA - possibility of reconfiguring as expansion opportunities Bing.

By the way, Microsoft is not the only ones who are trying to find an alternative to x86-processors, Facebook and Google are exploring the possibility of using their servers processors ARM.

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/226665/