Will China Grab ARM Servers?

Rick Merritt, EETimes
12/1/2016 08:18 PM EST

China's data center giants have become the next big hope to give traction to ARM's server initiative.

When Macom bought Applied Micro last week and said it would sell off its X-Gene ARM server unit, the writing was on the wall. Applied has a solid business with big U.S. data centers and in 2017 and beyond they are buying bandwidth in the form of 100-400G Ethernet — not ARM servers.

In the wake of the news I heard multiple reports Broadcom was ending Vulcan, its plan for a beefy ARM server SoC made in a FinFET process with a custom core. The risky product was expected to be cancelled ever since penny-pinching Avago bought the company. (A former Broadcom engineer told me the company also canceled plans for a set-top processor using custom ARM cores.)

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