Hewlett-Packard reportedly will partner with chip-maker Calxeda to develop data center servers powered by low-power processors designed by ARM Holdings.
Quoting unnamed people close to the situation, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that HP will become the first major OEM to adopt ARM-based processors for some of its servers, a move that would heighten the growing competition between ARM and Intel, the world s top chip maker.
Intel, which holds more than 80 percent of the overall global chip market and 90 percent of the $9 billion worldwide server chip space, has been aggressive in trying to break into the mobile device space, particularly smartphones and tablets, the bulk of which currently are powered by ARM chips manufactured by the likes of Texas Instruments, Samsung, Qualcomm and Nvidia.
At the same time, ARM executives have been vocal about their plans to move up the ladder and into PCs and low-power servers, and a number of manufacturers--including Calxeda, Marvell Technologies and Nvidia--are developing chips for the data center. Calxeda has a product-based event scheduled for Nov. 1, though the company has not yet said what the event will be about.
A Calxeda spokesperson declined to comment on the HP reports.
ARM CEO Warren East late last year said he expected to begin chipping away at Intel's server dominance in 2014, a sentiment echoed in recent interviews by ARM Vice President Michael Inglis. ARM executives argue that enterprises--particularly those with large and dense data centers--will gravitate toward more energy-efficient solutions, a strength of ARM's designs. ARM last year unveiled the Cortex-A15 design, which offers features that are important in servers, including greater memory capacity and virtualization support.
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HP Planning ARM-Based Servers With Calxeda, Challenging Intel: Reports
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