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While Intel may already be worried about ever gaining a foothold in the mobile chip market. ARM is starting to push into the high-end server market too with news of a 480-core, low power server in the works.
The company behind the new server is a data center startup called Calxeda. Its focus is on building a processor platform that will have a significant impact on IT costs and energy consumption. They go so far as to claim a factor of 10 reduction in costs and a 5x, or even 10x performance gain over what is currently available.
In order to produce hardware capable of reducing power consumption by such a large extent, the company has turned like so many others to ARM for its chips. It plans to develop a server consisting of up to 120 quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processors, which means as many as 480 available cores.
As for power use, when combined with DRAM Calxeda believes each node in the server will draw just 5 watts, or 1.25 watts per core. It is hoped that such a low power configuration combined with the proven performance on offer from the Cortex-A9 and so many cores, will be desirable to data centers.
As for when this server configuration will be ready, Calxeda isn’t saying yet and remains in stealth mode as a company for the moment.
