HP Teams Up With Calxeda For ARM-Based Servers

Hewlett-Packard is to partner with semiconductor start-up Calxeda to develop ARM-Based SoCs. Very recently, ARM released new ARMv8 chip architecture posing a competition to Intel and AMD in the Server market. HP is the world's top seller of servers, holding about 30% market share in terms of shipments and Intel being the expert in the server chip arena. HP was long associated with Intel for its server-based chips, dubbed Itanium, but has now decided to move on to ARM.

 

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ARM has been a strong presence in the mobile market and with this partnership with HP aims to move into the server chip field and expand its market. ARM-based chips are known to use less power than the x86-based processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), hence making it energy efficient, a good advantage over its competition. HP and ARM deal targets companies with huge data centres and who intend to lower their power consumption as well as physical footprint.

Though sample chips are coming by the end of year, an all-working commercial production is not expected to start till mid-2012. The ARM chips are supposed to be a 48nm or a 28nm process technology implementation. The partnership has not yet been made public by either side, AMD refusing to comment now, hence an accurate release schedule could not be acquired. In addition to HP, considering the recent unveiling of ARM-based 64-bit chips, sources also reveal that Calxeda is in talks with one or two other major companies. On the recent development, Intel responded to being on a confident front and does not consider this to be of any immediate threat.

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