ARM to have 20% of 2020 server IC market

ARM reckons it may have a 20% share of the server IC market in five years time.

ARM’s vp of investor relations told a meeting in Taipei that ARM’s market share was now less ghan 1% and Intel’s share of the server chip market is 90%.

He said that Intel’s ASP for a server chip is $600 while the cost of an ARM server chip is $100 to $200.

Moor Insights say that, over three years, the cost of buying and running ARM servers could be 35% less than x86 and they use two thirds the number of physical racks.

Canaccord reckon ARM server CPUs will have a 20% share of the server chip market by 2018.

ARM saw server chip revenues for the first time last year.

HP brought out two ARM-based servers – the ProLiant M400 with a 2.4GHz ARMv8-based Applied Micro X-Gene eight-core SoC and M800 which has a 32-bit Texas Instruments quad-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A15 with eight DSP cores.

The M800 is aimed at “businesses wanting VOIP/LTE, seismic processing and/or real-time video transcoding while saving on energy, space and cost,” says HP.. Customers for it include the US Department of Energy’s Sandia National Labs and the University of Utah. The M400 is for tasks like web caching and PayPal is one customer for it.

Four chip-makers have announced 64-bit ARM v8 chips to go into the server and networking markets.

The Big Beast is the 48 core v8 64-bit 2.5GHz Cavium processor called ThunderX. “ThunderX will enable Cavium to be the first ARM-based vendor to deliver the performance and features required by today’s volume server market at half the power and significantly lower cost compared to competing solutions,” says processor guru Linley Gwennap.

As well as ThunderX, there’s Applied Micro’s eight v8 core X-Gene processor and AMD’s eight v8 core Seattle processor.

In January, Iliad, the French provider of telecommunications services, launched a cloud service based on ARM-based servers which it has built in-house using Marvell chips.

18 servers – each with a quad-core CPU – can fit onto a blade, and 16 blades can fit in a chassis.