ARM servers planned with up to 480 cores

A start-up chip maker has disclosed early details of its planned ARM-based server chips, which could see energy-efficient servers with as many as 480 cores that consume no more than 600W of power.

Calxeda, formerly known as Smooth-Stone, hit the headlines last year when its plans to create ARM chips for the server market were first disclosed, and the company received funding from ARM and Texas Instruments, among other companies.

Although the firm is still playing many of its cards close to its chest, it disclosed to analysts that the first reference platform for vendor partners will be a quad-core system-on-a-chip (SoC) based on ARM's Cortex A9 design.

According to Calxeda, this chip will enable partners to build servers that cram up to 120 chips inside a standard 2U chassis. With four processors per chip or "node", such systems would have up to 480 cores, but with an average power consumption of just 5W per node, including DRAM, the entire system might draw just 600W.

Each node will also feature an embedded fabric for other individual quad-core nodes to talk to each other, which would imply some form of high-speed interconnect along the lines of AMD's HyperTransport or Intel's QuickPath Interconnect.

The company claims that its chips will deliver an advantage of five to 10 times the performance-per-watt of rival platforms, and said it will be open to real application testing later this year.

"We are also excited that once Calxeda-powered servers are in the market, software and applications will follow quickly, especially given these economics," said Karl Freund, vice president of marketing at Calxeda.

However, the company still has no delivery date for shipping products.