Intel and its x86 architecture continue to dominate the server processor industry, but competitors keep piling on.
The idea is that x86 based servers can be challenged by servers running highly energy-efficient ARM processors, which are best known for powering iPhones and other small devices. The plan is to cram lots of low-powered ARM processors into a server instead of just a few high-powered Intel processors. Theoretically these servers should be highly efficient but not compromise performance too much.
Because ARM doesn't manufacture its own chips -- it only licenses its designs to other vendors -- this opens the market to many new competitors. These include the upstart processor company Cavium and the more established Applied Micro, both of which are part of HP's newly announced Pathfinder partnership program.
HP was one of the first companies to announce plans to make ARM-powered servers with its Project Moonshot initiative. The company initially partnered with Calxeda, but it has since made room for Intel's own low-power Atom processors in the project. Intel is determined to stay in the mix should this market take off, but the new partnerships this week show that HP hasn't given up the dream of powering servers with ARM chips.
Cavium is especially interesting. Just last week, it announced plans to build 64-bit ARM processors, its first foray into server chips. The company has had great success in providing processors for networking gear like firewalls and switches since it was founded in 2001, but it's hungry for a new market.
Asked whether the company is going after the data center market because it's worried that the booming virtual networking business might hurt sales by reducing the amount of networking gear enterprises purchase, Cavium vice president of corporate and business development Amer Haider says: "No." He tells Wired that software-defined networking increases the processing needs of network gear, which actually works out in the company's favor.
"We're a processor company. We see a new market and we asked what we could build to enter that market," he says. That new market, he says, is cloud data centers.
Scale is the reason he believes the cloud data center market is different from the traditional enterprise data center market. Helping a medium sized enterprise consolidate four servers into one isn't necessarily enough to get them to switch to a new server architecture. But if Cavium can help a large cloud provider with huge data centers cut 10,000 servers down to 1,000 servers -- or even less -- then the company might have something.
HP announced Project Moonshot in November. Since then Dell announced its own plans to offer energy efficient ARM based servers, and AMD acquired SeaMicro and has licensed the ARM architecture with an eye towards the server market.
The trouble with existing ARM chips is that they can't handle enough memory for large server tasks, and they can't accommodate error correcting code memory, which limits data corruption. But new designs are in the works that fix these problems. ARM introduced a new 64-bit architecture in October that handles much larger amounts of memory, and this spring, ARM president Segars told us that it usually takes a "couple of years" for chips based on a new architecture to actually reach the market. Dell is already testing a 64-bit ARM processor from chip maker Marvel that offers ECC memory.
Wary of ARM's rise in the server market, Intel is beefing up its low-power Atom chip in similar ways, and this week, Jason Waxman, general manager of high density servers at Intel told us that this new Centerton chip will arrive in system by the end of the year. But the company will also continue to push its Xeon server chips as well.
"We're taking something of a 'bracketing' strategy," Waxman says. "We'll have these [Atom processors] that are as efficient as they can be, but we'll also have Xeon products that can offer both power efficiency and higher performance. We can blanket the market."
In other words, Intel doesn't necessarily agree that the ultra-low power server market will take off in a big way, but if it does, it intends to be ready.
Wired Enterprise editor Cade Metz contributed additional reporting to this article.
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