Smooth-Stone gets ARM and TI backing for low-power servers

The Smooth-Stone chips could prove attractive to datacentre managers

A Texas-based chip startup has received $48m (£30m) in funding to build datacentre servers based on a variant of ARM's smartphone processors.

Smooth-Stone secured the funding from ARM, Texas Instruments and the Advanced Technology Investment Company, an Abu Dhabi-based firm which owns the majority stake in Global Foundries.

Venture capital firms Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners also invested.

"It is an extremely difficult time for early-stage chip companies to get funding," Smooth-Stone chief executive Barry Evans told V3.co.uk.

"However, we could demonstrate something truly unique and disruptive, and show enough validation of sales interest from the market to take this all the way."

The company's business plan revolves around using modified ARM chips in sequence for processing tasks to provide a low-power alternative to top-of-the-range processors from Intel and AMD.

In response to reports of a four times power reduction, Evans suggested that Smooth-Stone's systems would be "substantially better".

Such processors are likely to be used in hyperscale cloud systems, but datacentre managers may find the low power units increasingly attractive given the current restraints on power costs and availability.

Several startups have moved into similar fields now that venture capital funding is expanding. SeaMicro has been working on servers using clusters of Intel Atom chips, while Marvell is planning similar systems using ARM cores.

"I think there are some really smart people targeting these kinds of power resources, and this will the key to buying decisions by datacentre managers in the future," Sean Dalton, general partner at Highland Capital Partners, told V3.co.uk.

The support of the chip community is crucial to Dalton's confidence in the Smooth-Stone product and the long-term growth potential of the market.

"There are some applications for this technology that are very nice hanging fruit. With others we're not so sure, but in between is a very large market," he said.