ARM CEO Says Company Will Offer Processor Designs For Servers
On Monday, ARM Chief Executive Officer Warren East told Bloomberg that server manufacturers are interested in ARM-based designs for processors that emphasize low power consumption in devices and data centers.
“Work is under way: system designers are actively considering ARM architectures,” East said in the interview. “We don’t want to raise expectations that next year there are going to be a lot of ARM servers. Of course, there aren’t.”
ARM's chip designs currently dominate the market for mobile devices. Apple's A4 mobile processors are based on ARM's Cortex line of processor designs, which power the iPhone and iPad devices. Google's Android operating system for mobile devices also runs ARM's architecture on devices built by manufacturers including Samsung, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm.
But Intel has recently shown its interest in moving into the mobile space by forming the Intel tablet and netbook group , which many Intel partners believe will make Intel more competitive in mobile devices, while preparing its tablet-specific Atom Oak Trail platform for launch early next year.
Meanwhile, Intel enjoys a 90 percent overall share of the microprocessor market, and a 90 percent share of the server segment. In September, ARM launched its Cortex-A15 mobile processors, code-named Eagle, which offer a significant performance boost to handheld devices, while allowing ARM to consider challenging Intel by spreading its architecture for low-power chips to the networking and server markets.
ARM's executives have been rather outspoken recently with regard to Intel and the direction they see the microprocessor industry taking as a whole. Last month, Dr. Hermann Hauser, a co-founder of ARM, offered scathing opinions of Intel and predicted that ARM would bring about the end of the microprocessor. This followed an interview in which East himself said he expects ARM to continue to dominate the tablet market and isn't worried about the challenge Intel represents.