The New ARM Juggernaut Is A Server On A Chip

Tell me what a server is these days. Applied Micro Circuit CEO Paramesh Gopi says that it’s on an ARM chip that needs far less room and eats up less power than the Intel and AMD x86 servers that now dominate data centers.

But now with data generated at unprecedented scale, efficiency is the new order of business. And because of that, ARM is getting noticed.

“For companies like Facebook and Google, the P&L is a function of electricity cost,” Gopi said.

Applied Micro, Calxeda, Dell, Rackspace, Red Hat, HP — the list of companies talking about ARM will only increase.

For its part, Applied Micro unveiled its 64-bit server last week at the Open Compute Summit where I caught up with Gopi about the company’s new server-on-a-chip design.

In the video above, we cover the genesis of the project, the battles Applied Micro has chosen to fight and what’s to come as the demands for efficiency only become more pronounced.