ARM is currently the undisputed heavyweight champion of the global mobile marketplace. However, the company has recently accelerated development of low-powered server chips in response to what it describes as “customer demand.”
“We’ve been doing some testing over the past year or so,” ARM marketing chief Ian Drew told ZDNet UK.
“People talk to us about energy efficiency in a number of different areas, from microcontrollers all the way through to servers. We’ve been talking to a few semiconductor partners and a number of [manufacturers] in the last couple of years on this.”
According to Drew, ARM is currently running one of its websites – the Linux Internet Platform – on a Marvell-based, “very small” cluster of chips.
“We switched it in about six months ago — it’s going OK. It’s one of these things where you don’t know what you don’t know until you try it.
“[But], I don’t want to set false hopes for [ARM-based] home servers in WalMart in the next year. We’re an [intellectual property] company — we learned in last two years that we don’t know everything about everything. [The server market] will take multiple years to get to some form of reality.”
