As One ARM Pioneer Closes Another One Opens

Peter Clarke, Electronics360
04 February 2014

Almost as soon as ARM-based server company Calxeda Inc. (Austin, Texas) had said it could not continue its operations in December 2013 than another ARM-based server company, Rex Computing Inc. was wowing them in the aisles at the Open Compute Project summit in San Jose, Calif.

So what is it about Rex that makes the company different and likely to do better than Calxeda. And what does it say about the evolving semiconductor industry.

Well the first thing to state is that the closure of Calxeda was one of very few set-backs for the ARM ecosystem in recent years. Secondly it does not mean that ARM-based processors will not be introduced in that space. Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) is launching the X-Gene 64-bit processor for server applications and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has just launched the Opteron 1100 series 64-bit ARM processor to name just two major chip companies attacking the market.

And "major" is the operative word here.

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