ARM Chips on the Rise, Dell Working on Servers

Dell predicts that ARM (News - Alert) architecture will soon be making its way into the mainstream microserver market - which makes sense. If a drastically smaller form factor for servers can be attained and still pump out just as much power as conventional setups, why not go with the space-saving solution?

Aside from just saving on physical space, an ARM-based server setup will greatly reduce power consumption - think smartphone processors. Energy savings are expected to be reduced to as much as 89 percent, while physical space requirement will be trimmed down to an astounding 94 percent.

Dell has started a seed program codenamed Copper, which aims to introduce ARM-based microservers to the world of cloud computing. While Intel (News - Alert) may not be thrilled about one of the top supporters of its architecture picking up another partner, this is still a huge step forward for server technology nonetheless.

The chipsets being used in this testing stage belong to Marvell’s (News - Alert) quad-core Armada family. As far as the space-to-power ratio goes, a single rack can contain up to 2,688 cores - that’s 129 cores to a box.

Canonical (developers of Ubuntu (News - Alert) Linux) as well as Cloudera are among the first to adopt Dells new ARM-based microserver technology, sending the program into the world of open source right from the start.

The OpenStack Foundation, a huge family of open source developers and companies, are also on board with Dell’s (News - Alert) Copper project, further suggesting that this ARM approach may gain a lot of support from the open source community as well as Linux, which is one of the operating systems of choice for a notable amount of servers.

Dell is said to have been testing ARM server solutions since 2010, starting with select hyperscale customers in attempt to “understand their interest level and expectations for ARM-based servers.”

For now, ARM is only providing 32-bit chipsets as opposed to Intel’s provision of more powerful 64-bit chips - but that’s set to change as soon as the end of this year.