Intel’s data center chief has slammed the trend to put low powered processors into large servers, claiming that ARM-based chips, and even the firm’s own Atom, will remain in a niche in this sector, at best. The comments came as several firms, from Marvell to start-up Calxeda, look to leverage the ARM architecture to reduce power consumption in cloud servers, and as another start-up, SeaMicro, does the same with Atom. The development shows how the traditional dividing lines are blurring in processors, with the ARM platforms expanding into new sectors such as set-top boxes, while their own cellphone stronghold comes under attack from Atom and even MIPS.
Speaking at last week’s Morgan Stanley technology and telecoms conference, Kirk Skaugen, general manager of Intel’s data center unit, said: ‘We’ve been out talking about Atom and servers for several years to our customers under NDA. And candidly, there hasn’t been a lot of interest in that architecture in a broad sense. I could see if you go out four to five years maybe 10% of the total market, give or take a couple percent, could be interested in such an architecture.’
ARM CEO Warren East, in his own recent presentations, has been increasingly bullish about his architecture being ready for the high end server market. But Skaugen argues there is a long way to go, and it’s not all about performance. He said: ‘Now what’s the challenge that ARM has in that same form factor? Well, it has an instruction set issue. So if you’re going to do hosting what application do you host? We did application porting with Itanium, it took us about 10 years. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to port about 14,000 applications.’ He added that current ARM models are 32-bit processors, while Microsoft supports 64-bit operating systems. ‘Everything we do in servers for real servers will be 64-bit,’ he concluded.
Such cold water has not stopped SeaMicro gaining high publicity for its promise of an Atom-based server priced at $148,000. It does this by putting 256 dual-core Atoms in one box, claiming about 25% of the power consumption of a traditional rack of machines.
And whatever the data center division of Intel may say, the Atom arm has its eye firmly on the server, and on keeping ARM out. This is a rare occasion where Intel has modified a chip specifically for a start-up. One of the weaknesses of the original design ‘ as with ARM-based alternatives ‘ was the 32-bit nature of Atom when most server software is written for 64-bit machines. So, according to GigaOM, SeaMicro executives went to Intel last summer and the two firms came up with a dual-core Atom that can deliver 64-bit processing and also doubles the memory to 4Gbytes. The dual-core design means SeaMicro can support 512 cores with half the number of actual chips, reducing motherboard space and power consumption (the latter by 15%).
Jason Waxman, general manager of high density computing in Intel’s data center group, told GigaOM that other companies could use the new Atom part too but admitted that, despite being a start-up, SeaMicro was a ‘definitional customer ‘ someone who is helping us anticipate what some customers want and value, and we always want to see what we can do, and are receptive to exploring.’ Existing SeaMicro customers include Skype, Orange and Mozilla.
As ARM licensees grapple with software issues for the cloud server space, they are likely to see more rapid results in other new markets, notably set-top boxes, where MIPS cores are dominant. Earlier this year, NDS, the multinational conditional access firm, made an important step towards an ARM set-top, when it put its Infinite TV software on the ARM Cortex A9, backed up by the Mali GPU design. Now Samsung is thought to be creating Google TV hardware, but using ARM processors rather than Google’s chosen Intel platform. Samsung has its own ambitious multiscreen video strategy, but sources say it will now
enhance its Android strategy with a parallel move to support Google TV. The interesting part of the latest reports, issued by Bloomberg, is that Samsung would depart from the Intel chips that have, so far, been the only ones included in the specs. The initial TV hardware partner for the platform was Sony.
The addition of ARM architectures could help broaden the ecosystem for the TV platform and make it more affordable for consumer electronics vendors. The high price of Google TV products, which first appeared last year, has helped limit its market impact compared to other internet connected TVs (set-top boxes are about $300, compared to $100 for Apple TV or Roku). This is partly down to the cost of materials, say analysts, including the Intel Atom processor and 1Gbyte of unified RAM for video and apps data. Google argues the price tag is justified by the added value, and that it will lead the push into creating a unified multiscreen TV platform, harnessing Android tablets and phones too.
Samsung could drive down costs and also leverage efficiencies between its various business units ‘ chips, TVs and phones/tablets ‘ something it has been doing more effectively in the past year than in the past, as seen in the adoption of Samsung processors and displays by the mobile phone division, and the plans for a multiscreen movie store.
In traditional set-top boxes, as in home broadband equipment, MIPS is the strong platform, but that company is looking for its own new territories, particularly in mobile devices. It gained a place in smartphones recently via a tie-up with China’s Ingenic Semiconductor, a Beijing-based firm with a MIPS32 architectural license. The firm has now launched its MIPS-based app processor, coupled with a modem from another Chinese player, Spreadtrum, and targeting sub-$100 Android smartphones for its home market. New LTE chip players like Sequans and Altair are also using MIPS cores in their products.