Microsoft has evidently formed a group of companies that creates its own processor designs with ARM computing cores. This is reported by the news service Bloomberg , citing internal sources. The CPU group is subordinate to Jason Zander, the head of Microsoft’s cloud division Azure.

According to their own According to Bloomberg ARM processors are primarily intended for Microsoft’s data centers. But there should also be considerations to incorporate experience with ARM CPUs in mobile processors for the Surface division.

Advantage thanks to tailor-made specifications In-house chip designs would have several advantages compared to “off the shelf” from AMD or Intel: Microsoft could tailor the processors to its own needs, which potentially increases efficiency and reduces costs. Amazon shows with its own Graviton CPUs that this can work well: A tenth of the bookable AWS CPU instances come from Graviton and Graviton2 CPUs, which are cheaper than AMD or Intel variants.

CPU-Designer ARM makes it easier to design your own processors with licensable cores. The Neoverse N1 cores, which Amazon also uses for Graviton2, are currently intended for servers. Companies take such a core in multiple versions, connect all of them with an interconnect and attach storage controllers plus I / O connections – ARM and other design companies help.

High performance with license cores The website Anandtech recently opened Amperes 80 – Looked at Kerner Altra, who is the first Neoverse N1 offshoot to be available in free trade in the form of servers and is still up-to-date with AMDs 64 – Kernern based on Zen-2 (Rome, Epyc 7002) can create.

The improved Neoverse-V1 cores are already in the starting blocks – the European Processor Initiative (EPI) of the EU is building its own 72 – Kerner Rhea HPC with it. In addition, ARM has a Neoverse N2 on offer.

In the meantime, Microsoft could make itself independent of Qualcomm for Surface notebooks and tablets. Qualcomm’s SQ1 and the minimally improved SQ2, both of which are derived from the Snapdragon 8cx, are in the only ARM offshoot Surface Pro X so far. The chip manufacturer announced the latter two years ago, a successor is not yet in sight – but would be sorely necessary in view of Apple’s ARM advance on Macs.

ARM recently in the run-up to the ideas of Apple M1, Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 and Samsung Exynos 1080 use the Cortex computing core -A 78 C is presented, which should therefore be particularly suitable for octo-core SoCs for notebooks.

(mma)