Samsung May Start Making ARM Server Chips

angry tapir writes "Samsung's recent licensing of 64-bit processor designs from ARM suggests that the chip maker may expand from smartphones and tablets into the server market, analysts believe. Samsung last week licensed ARM's first 64-bit Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 processors, a sign the chip maker is preparing the groundwork to develop 64-bit chips for low-power servers, analysts said. The faster 64-bit processors will appear in servers, high-end smartphones and tablets, and offer better performance-per-watt than ARM's current 32-bit processors, which haven't been able to expand beyond embedded and mobile devices. The first servers with 64-bit ARM processors are expected to become available in 2014."

Comments

Re:Remember now

[White Flame]

The recent 32-bit ARMs supports LPAE, so you can have over 4GB no problem. That's still running a 32-bit address space per app, which would probably still work fine for a mobile environment.

Re:What are these low power servers good for?

[cstdenis]

* DNS servers (if you aren't virtualizing stuff)
* email servers (if your spam scanning is external)
* some database servers (generally io bound not cpu bound, tho it of course depends on the nature of the queries)
* simple web hosting (stuff like a CDN serving static files needs almost no CPU)
* monitoring servers
* Camera/surveillance servers (video processing is mostly done by dedicated chips on capture cards)

Really, most servers are not CPU bound these days and would probably benefit from many low-clocked cores than few high-clocked ones. They are exceptions of course, that is why we have super-computers at the other extreme.