ARM’s foray into the server market
Coming close on the heels of ARM’s CEO, Warren East’s remark that ARM based servers will be out in the market in the next 12 months, comes news from Marvell – the fabless company aims to supply silicon for ARM-based servers with 40-nm multi core processors that it will ship this year. As per EE Times, Marvell and ARM are working with “multiple Tier 1 companies” to build larger trial deployments to validate ARM as a server platform. Separately, Marvell has opened up its dual-core architecture, drivers and board support package so partners can create server software needed to support the new market initiative”
Opinions about ARM’s foray into server market making a dent in Intel’s server biz vary. ARM’s marketing chief, Ian Drew recently pointed out that “We’re an [intellectual property] company — we learned in last two years that we don’t know everything about everything. On the servers, it will take longer than we imagine because it’s a much more complex problem [than smartbooks or phones]”. ARM is running one of its websites (for the ARM Linux Internet Platform) on a cluster of ARM based chips, part of a handful of experiments to test out the viability of using its chip architecture in severs. They are Marvel based.
The server market, long dominated by Intel, has lately seen increasing power concerns. Google’s recent acquisition, Agnilux, was rumored to be making servers with ARM architecture. TI is researching the use of DSPs in servers. Intel’s best hope can lie in working along with companies using its low power Atom chips to build power efficient servers.
“East wasn’t willing to name the chip foundries that ARM is working with, however he said that information should tip up in the next 12 months.” Now if one of these foundries happens to be GlobalFoundries, it’d be interesting to see how the server market pans out – Intel’s long term rival, AMD and Global Foundries share the same parent company.