ARM and Nvidia put pressure on x86 in servers

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 1 Aug 2012 at 16:46

UK chip designer ARM has provided the processing for the smartphone revolution, creating hardware for handsets from manufacturers from Apple to ZTE, but now it wants a slice of the server market, too.

ARM is taking aim at the x86 slice of the server market, with the company claiming its low-power processors are better suited to the data centre than those from AMD and Intel.

British server manufacturer Boston recently released what it claimed to be the first ARM server to market, while ARM argues that changes in the software used by web giants could allow non-x86 hardware to threaten rival chip makers.

Instead of traditional software packages from Oracle, Microsoft and SAP there is a combination of user owned software and open source

"The most significant thing is the way data centres are going," said Ian Ferguson, director of server systems at ARM. "With the Amazons and the Facebooks and their Chinese equivalents, there's been a shift in how the whole software ecosystem has been built out.

"Although software packages such as Windows Server are currently designed solely for the x86 platform, Linux and apps built for it can happily run on ARM processors. Instead of traditional software packages from Oracle, Microsoft and SAP, there is a combination of user owned software and open source," Ferguson said.

"For a non-x86 architecture, there's an opportunity to compete, with less ties to x86 binaries and things like that," he added. "Clearly, Windows has a very strong position in the enterprise server markets, but in the cloud it's heavily centred around Linux."

Power versus energy

Research firm IDC believes that power benefits could help ARM supplant Intel and AMD processors in niche applications. "There's a long way to go, but, there's a real interest in this sort of thing from data centres and big data companies," said Nathaniel Martinez, program director for European Systems and Infrastructure Solutions. "ARM is turning up the heat on x86 manufacturers."

According to Boston, the energy efficiencies can be significant for big data centres struggling to get enough electricity to run their systems.

"More and more, it's about how much power is being consumed – people can be limited by how much actual power they can get into their buildings," said Neil Kalsi, sales manager at Boston. "We're having discussions with people that are talking of gigawatt feeds, and still being hampered by what they can do."

Citing power consumption of 5W per system in its Viridis servers compared to 70W-80W per chip in some entry-level x86 server hardware, Kalsi said the cost of running ARM servers could be dramatically cheaper.

Those power concerns come alongside a softer demand for processing power - the requirements in data centres are often far more pragmatic than gadgets, analysts told PC Pro.

"If you look at things like data mining, you are looking at patterns in data, as opposed to working out the weather forecast in two days' time which is more intensive because you're doing raw compute stuff," Ferguson said. "We're not talking eight-core 3.5GHz types of chips, we tend to be coming from a more modest computer performance point – there's a better alignment with the cloud type of apps to ARM's performance.

"You still need big CPUs to go and do some massive number crunching apps. People will continue to do that, and probably we'll see them pursue that for a long time with x86. In other areas, we're going to see people integrating other functions around the CPU or GPUs to better customise devices for specific apps, whether that's with ARM or Nvidia."