HP to announce ARM-based servers

HP today announced a new industry program comprising a new server development platform, customer discovery lab and partner ecosystem to help its customers reduce complexity, energy use and costs.

Calxeda said that its EnergyCore system-on-a-chip consumes just 5 watts per server node, a tenth of the power that rival chips consume, it claimed. Calxeda did not release the actual performance of the chip, so a direct comparison between its solution and rival chips could not be made. 

The EnergyCore processor SoC includes a supercomputing-class 80-Gigabit fabric switch and an integrated management engine with power optimization software, all on a single piece of silicon, according to Calxeda. The EnergyCore SoC also includes a full complement of server I/O features (10 Gbit/s Ethernet MACs, four PCI Express Gen 2 links and five 3 Gbit/s serial ATA interfaces, according to EE Times) and a 4MB ECC L2 cache, allowing a complete server node that consumes only 5 watts, including 4GB of ECC memory and a large capacity SSD.