ARM Servers Face Long, Winding Road

Rick Merritt, EETimes
10/31/2013 08:05 AM EDT

Big, disruptive opportunities don't come along very often. Don't expect one anytime soon in the mega battle between ARM and Intel.

For example, the road to ARM-based servers now looks longer and narrower than previously thought. Two years ago, ARM and its partners had visions of significantly encroaching on the cloud computing space Intel dominates with its Xeon processor

Applied Micro launched to much fanfare its XGene SoC based on a custom 64-bit ARM core at ARM Tech Con in 2011. Soon after, a laundry list of other ARM partners, from AMD to Samsung, tipped plans or quietly ramped up ARM server design teams.

This week, Hewlett-Packard said it has server boards using ARM-based chips from Applied, Calxeda, and Texas Instruments running in the lab and will ship them next year. But HP rival Dell, which has also been prototyping ARM-based servers, added a little darker color to the situation.

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