They're everywhere. Or so it seems. Countless companies are building servers with ultra-low-power ARM processors, hoping to unseat Intel as the undisputed king of the server chips. Companies like Cavium and Calxeda are hoping that servers based on the same chip architecture at the heart of your cellphone will one day compete with Intel-based servers on speed -- while consuming far less power.
In the server world, power is money. Lots of money.
But there's at least one thing holding back the ARM insurgency. Applications written for today's Intel servers won't necessarily run on ARM chips. The Intel x86 standard has been around for decades, and many companies rely on software written for this architecture.
Enter Elbrus Technologies. The Moscow-based startup is building a secret weapon for these ARM upstarts: an efficient emulator for running x86 applications on ARM. The software is currently in "alpha" testing stage, and Chief Development Officer Anatoly Konukhov claims it can run x86 code about 40 percent as efficiently as it would run if it were native ARM code. But the company hopes to have a working product ready for public testing by 2013, and by the end of 2014, he says, it will reach 80 percent efficiency.
"We believe that 2014 will be the year of ARM actively invading server market," Konukhov says, "and it will be a perfect time to enter x86 emulation market."
He says that right now, there are only a handful of companies working on ARM servers, so the market for emulation is still pretty small. But he says that some businesses are very interested in the cost savings of running ARM, and that many of them will need to emulate proprietary x86-only software when they make the leap.
His company has big ambitions, but the engineering team has a history of developing efficient x86 emulators. Elbrus was founded in 2010 by employees of MCST -- the company behind the Russian computer system also called Elbrus. In 2012, MCST and the Russian investment fund Skolkovo invested $1.3 million into the new Elbrus Technologies.
At MCST, the startup team was part of the Binary Translation Department building x86 emulators for the Russian microprocessor E2K. According to Konukhov, their emulator performed 85 percent as well as native code. They also took part in a joint project with Intel to develop an x86 translator for Intel's Itanium chip that achieved 90 percent of native performance. Konukhov says that MCST has published 46 journal articles on binary translation, and that the company has several USA patents in the field.
Elbrus Technology's secret sauce is its binary translator with multiple layers of hand-tuned optimization. And all the translations are handled in memory to speed up the process, with the translator itself taking up just 1MB of memory.
Although the goal is to reach 80 percent of the performance of native ARM, Knukhov says stability is more important. "Our marketing research clearly shows that most vendors and users are interested in functionality and stability rather then performance," he says. "It is possible for us to release our solution without fully reaching performance goals and enhancing it afterwards."
In the meantime, they're working with ARM hardware makers and are seeking more partners to give them chips to develop against. Engineers from the company will present at the ARM TechCon event in Santa Clara, California, from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1.
