We are impatient creatures, but this week it was useful to look at products that will not be on the market until 2014. They involve low-power chips based on designs from ARM, useful in large data centers as well as mobile devices.
Previously, ARM designs were not as computationally capable as mainstream chips from Intel, in part because they run on 32-bit instruction sets, not the 64-bit lines that more effectively uses memory. This week, however, ARM and its manufacturing partners announced a 64-bit design.
You'll see the first impacts in places like Facebook and Amazon, but you'll see lots more uses after that, in the data centers of banks and e-commerce companies, which will use more servers that are less costly to run. There are a lot of business applications which now run on 64-bit Intel processors, and they can more easily be adapted to the new ARM design.
That, in turn, is likely to mean more powerful chips in lots of consumer devices, as scale ma kes the chips cheaper, and people want personal machines that run along similar designs.
“We start with an assumption that all of our chips are going to end up in $20 phones†eventually, said Warren East, the president of ARM. “Every new low-end phone replaces something with less sophistication.â€
Mr. East said phones using the advanced chips could have three times their current battery life. He also foresaw other chips being used in devices like thermostats and washing machines, which are increasingly connected to the Internet.
Last November, Hewlett-Packard announced it was building a server based on ARM-designed processors. Even at 32 bits, low-power chips were attractive for computer servers that are stacked by the thousands for simple back-and-forth movements of data, like in social media and e-commerce.
On Monday, chip maker AMD said it will be making a 64-bit processor, which it would put into the small, low-power “microservers†made by SeaMicro, a company it purchased earlier this year.
The market, said Rory Read, the chief executive of AMD, is large data centers, video distributors, and Big Data analysis firms.
“These are areas of the market with double-digit growth,†he said. Consumer devices like personal computers, which use AMD's variants of the Intel x86 processor “will continue to sell, but not at high growth.†He indicated that AMD is also looking at putting the ARM design into consumer devices.
Intel, which makes low-power chips of its own, would not use an ARM design, Mr. Read said. “They like the status quo,†he said.
Other chip makers besides AMD that are adopting the 64-bit chip design include Broadcom, which among other things supplies chips to a high-end server maker called Arista; Calxeda ,which supplies the H.P. server; Samsung, Intel's top competitor in terms of volume; HiSilicon, the former chip unit of Huawei; and STMicroelectronics.
“We try to create an environment where people can sell more chips,†said ARM's Mr. East. “We have used that model with handset manufacturers, now we're applying it more widely. This isn't just about servers, or devices. It's about the network infrastructure that is on street corners. It is in everything.â€
