ARMs in the Clouds

By SemiWiki

February 11, 2013

The most interesting session at the Linley Tech Data Center Conference last week was the last one, on Designing Power Efficient Servers. What this was really about was whether ARM would have any success in the server market and what Intel's response might be.

Datacenters are now very focused on power efficiency and many track Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) which is the ratio of the power used by the servers to the power used by everything else (routers, cooling, power distribution, backup etc). 2 is average and new facilities target 1.5. Power is generally the limiting factor on the size of a rack and the size of a datacenter so further improvements are required. More than a third of the cost of ownership of a datacenter is proportional to the electrical usage. So despite the obvious issues with a change of architecture (porting software), if big savings can be made they can be truly compelling.

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