Anticipation Builds for ARM-Powered Servers

Yesterday, the popular tech blog GigaOM posted a story about Ian Drew, executive vice president of marketing at ARM Holdings. ARM is known for its low-powered processors that have cornered the market on smartphones, tablets, and many other devices.

Lately, Drew has become quite popular with the announcement that ARM is bringing their chips to the server market. In an arena that has been dominated by behemoths, Intel and AMD, it might surprise some to even think of an ARM processor in a server. But it is no surprise to technology experts working in web hosting, especially in data centers.

Power costs money. Energy consumption is an environmental and financial expense that many data centers are trying to significantly cut. As Drew explained,

“While the x86 world focused on pure megahertz, we have focused on the megahertz per milliwatt”

ARM-powered servers will introduce boxes that are powerful enough to still perform well on the Web, while also reducing energy consumption and, as a result, cost. Drew says the ARM advancement into the server realm will not happen overnight. They will begin testing next year and expect to produce market-ready low-power server chips within the next three to five years.

Source: GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2010/07/29/arm-server-foray/
Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

Common Server Architectures

In computer lingo, when someone talks about architecture, they usually mean the type of CPU driving the system. For servers, the most used architecture has traditionally been x86, but this has gradually been supplanted by x86_64 (64-bit). Here is a list of various server architectures.

x86 – This dates back to 1978 and Intel’s 8086 processor, which would seem ancient by today’s standards. Servers running 32-bit x86 processors are typically dual-core or quad-core systems.

x86_64 – AMD started the 64-bit movement by releasing AMD64 processors that essentially an extension of the x86 instruction set, allowing for backwards compatibility. Intel now has their own versions of x86_64 processors, including the Xeon, which is often used for web servers.

Itanium(IA-64) – Intel’s attempt at 64-bit server architecture is now losing popularity, although some HP servers still use it. Microsoft recently announced that they will stop supporting it.

PowerPC – Although this architecture is famous on the desktop for powering Apple computers for several years, it is IBM’s server architecture of choice. These processors are still used today.

SPARC – Originally constructed by Sun Microsystems (now a part of Oracle), one could list the future of this server architecture as uncertain. Some large companies, such as Fujitsu, however, are still using it.

ARM – This processor architecture has been traditionally used for mobile devices, but they recently announced that some energy-efficient servers will use them in the future.

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

ARM CEO Promises Server CPUs in 2011

Warren East, CEO of Arm Holdings revealed that he expects servers based on ARM multicore processors to arrive in 2011. ARM processors are best known in the mobile device market, especially smartphones, because of their low power consumption.

Normally, low power consumption equates to low speed, which is fine for handheld devices but not for servers. Nevertheless, East argued that their multicore ARM processors are now “pushing up to 2GHz”. While this is still a far cry from the speed being delivered by current Intel and AMD server chips, it has potential.

At this point, there is no reason to suspect ARM will even have room to squeeze into the server processor market, even if their chips do start to come close to or match Intel and AMD performance. Still, many companies may have room for ARM-powered servers. Lowering energy consumption in data centers has become a concern, and ARM could offer an alternative, low-power solution.

Source: Tom’s Hardware
Photo: Wikimedia Commons