16nm Finfet ARM SoCs On The Market This Year.

ARM says there is a possibility that ARM-based SoCs made on TSMC’s 16nm finfet process will be out on the market later this year. Asked when he thought the first 16nm finfet ARM implementations will hit the market, Pete Hutton, evp and president of ARM’s product group, tells me: “We’re squinting at this year.” This is significant because of the delay to Intel’s 14nm process which is not expected to produce processors for the market until Q3. It may also have some bearing on Altera’s rumoured considerations on whether to move back to TSMC after flirting with a move to Intel for 14nm foundry.

TSMC has been saying, recently, that it has practically closed the gap in process technology with Intel. These statements met with initial scepticism but it now, it seems, there could be some truth in them.

If so, it bodes ill for Intel’s server business which needs a competitive edge just when server revenues are trickling into ARM for the first time.

“Our first partners are starting to get their first results,” says Hutton

Hutton sees the server market as a 50 million unit a year opportunity and ARM aspires to a 5-10% market share by 2017.

This year it sees itself gaining a ‘single digit percentage’ market share.

Asked if the collapse of Calxeda has had any effect on ARM’s momentum in servers, Hutton replied: “It’s unfortunate for them. We’ve hired a few of their guys. They tried to go with 32-bit but the market really wants 64-bit and those guys are getting traction.”

A major plus for ARM’s move into servers is the launch of AMD’s ARM-based server offerings. “Their experience in this space is a real advantage,” said Hutton.

However, the biggest advantage ARM has in the server space is the opportunity it gives customers to customise their ARM-based server SoCs.

Intel just provides a ready-made chip and peripherals and the customer can take it or leave it – but if an ARM core is used a customer can tailor the SoC precisely to his requirement.

With the big datacentre operators – Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google et al – increasingly drawing up their own server specs which they then bung over to the Taiwan OEMs for implementation, the customisation opportunity is becoming more valuable.

Asked what he thought of the characterisation that the heavy-lifting in servers needs to be done by Intel processors while lighter tasks can be left to ARM processors, Hutton replied:

“I’d say that’s an Intel characterisation. ARM-based solutions can use multiple high performance cores for heavy-lifting.”

Indeed, ARM partner Applied Micro has a server chip which uses eight 64-bit ARM cores each running at 3GHz.

 

 

 

 


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