ARM: The nature of servers has changed in the cloud

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

Changes brought about by the rise in cloud computing have had a huge impact on servers and server design, and could be the key factor in bringing ARM’s low-power RISC chips into the datacentre. ARM believes that the rise of cloud companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon is bringing about a change in attitudes to processors that could make its chips relevant for these companies, posing a potential threat to Intel and AMD’s server businesses.

Over the past few years, "the nature of servers has changed," ARM’s general manager of its processor and physical IP divisions, Simon Segars told ZDNet this week. "It’s really the growth in cloud [and] growth in companies doing web hosting [and] social sites. As that has grown the nature of servers has changed."…

These workloads place the emphasis on light computing tasks but with lots of parallelism and frequent use of large amounts of data, Segar said. Because of this, people are becoming ever more concerned with the power consumed by each individual processor, and this could bring ARM chips into the datacentre…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/arm-the-nature-of-servers-has-changed-7000004294/