ARM is a serious threat to Intel in the mobile space—no doubt about that—but it’s also starting to nip at Intel’s heels in the server market. Bloomberg says two people “familiar with the matter” claim that HP is gearing up to release some servers based on ARM technology.
Word from the unnamed sources is that HP “is working on the chips” with Calxeda, a Texas firm part-owned by ARM. The report doesn’t go into much more detail, but Calxeda’s website does. By the look of it, the firm is is doing some pretty interesting things with ARM chips in servers:
Calxeda is bringing revolutionary computational efficiency to the data center, leveraging ultra-low power ARM processors as the foundation for next generation server designs. . . . We are working with several large and small system vendors who are designing servers that will contain many hundreds of cores in a 2U server chassis. A single Calxeda server node, complete with memory and integrated inter-node fabric scaling to thousands of nodes, will only consume 5 watts, enabling new server designs that could even be battery or solar powered, and withstand harsh environmental conditions.
Intel shouldn’t lose any sales to HP quite yet, though. Calxeda says it will release “early platforms for proof of concept projects” later in the year, and it doesn’t expect volume production to kick off until some time in the first half of 2012.