News ARM server pioneer Calxeda all-but folds

Surprised to say the least if demand is there then surely they would be raking it in. Maybe the demand is just not there as people think it might be.

 

Who else thinks Intel gave HP a price and support package that was way too good to refuse? Suspicious ol' me thinks Intel would have known that Calxeda desperately needed this sale and would have done anything to help them fold.

I wonder if money changed hands between Intel and HP... how much was it? And in which direction?

 

Watch your homophones, Gareth "a common site" X-o

Interesting article, and even more interesting comment about the Osborne Effect.

 

Crikey hadn't seen that one coming, had been reading all the hype about the 64-bit arm architecture.

 

Given Intel's track record, I would say it's a pretty safe bet they greased the rails. HP probably got their Atoms for pennies.
I mean, they've been pretty cut-throat just trying to keep competing x86 processors marginalized, going back to the 486 clones. Hell, they quit using model numbers for the Pentium just so they could trademark the name.

ARM isn't even COMPATIBLE with anything they make. If they let it catch on in this market, they'll have an uphill fight to reclaim it.
They will do anything and everything in their power to keep ARM out of the server market... right until the very second they have their own ARM parts to sell, when it will suddenly be the next big innovation from the industry leader.

 

Its possible. It could also be that HP decided that the Atoms were good enough performance per watt and over all tdp combined with allowing x86 code execution and higher RAM amounts.

At least from what I can see, Silvermont arch is better than Cortex A15 in most cases as it stands currently in performance per watt and A57 is still a bit off from seeing a server room.


Price is certainly a consideration, but in the general server market, the CPU is a relatively small piece of the overall price, especially in machines that run 24x7. A z3770 is $37 in 1,000 unit lots according to Intel ARK, I'd assume any server varient probably isn't going to run significantly more than that. Maybe $50 a pop.

8GB of ECC RDIMMs are going to cost more than the CPU is for many of these machines (or at least possibly/likely).

Its also possible that the overall architecture of the server was easier/cheaper to construct with the other things that Atom was bringing to the table, or maybe not.

Intel could have subsidized the heck out of the price to cut out ARM. I wouldn't put it past Intel, but that doesn't mean that is what actually happened. The new silvermont Atoms are actually very good, in a lot of ways better than almost anything ARM designed on the actual market today.

 

To be honest - just look at how good Bay Trail Atoms actually are. 8" tablets with them are passive and i didn't even catch the glimpse of any heat yet on my Miix 2. 2W typical power consumption, 4W TDP for a quadcore x86 CPU - ARM will have hard task fighting against that. TDP difference is too low, performance is similar or better, Atom has x86 compatibility...

 

The last bit is the big one that people refuse to think is the + point. But for most big companies its a huge +.

Arm servers requires someone to actually buy them to be successful. Google is gonna make its own is the rumours theres 1 huge demand just gone, Same with Facebook. They are 2 biggest potential customers and they are both thinking of making there own chips.

Does not really leave alot of target areas.

 

Hmm...Google wants ARM servers, Calxeda is broke...and Google's pile of money is starting to get too big for Sergey and Larry to sleep on comfortably. What to do, what to do?

 

Facebook might get first dibs http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/18/facebook_frankovsky_calxeda_board/

Google and Facebook isn't a "huge demand". ARM sells ~10B CPUs a year, so even 10M servers is low volume by ARM's standards.

ARM getting into servers is also about ruining Intel's margins, not entirely about selling more chips. If Intel introduce subsidized Atoms and reduce the margins on their Xeons to compete with cheap-as-chips ARM parts, then ARM still wins even if they don't sell a single socket.

 

ARM all combined might sell 10bil I have my douts personally, But the 2 - 3 major companies ( apple , Samsung, Qualcomm) who produce and use them in smartphone tablets and servers between them are not even close to 1bil chips shipped let alone sold.

If ARM was licencing chips for 10bil as it would it would also be a lot richer than it currently is.

Licence estimates put it at around 700million chips sold btw.

 

http://www.arm.com/products/processors/index.php


would seem ARM somewhat disagree with you by a about 29 BILLION of units sold

 

Where did you get that 700m number? I got 10B from a press release - "Q3 revenue came from the sales of about 2.5 billion ARM-based chips" and did a very simple 2.5B * 4 = 10B

 

You kinda just showed why between you arm servers will never be profitable. 30bil chips sold or licenced net £188million for 2012. In sept 2013 they only received 118mil total revenue for the quater. (all from there published financials)

That's worse revenue per chip than I have ever seen.

 

Not bad for a company that doesnt actually make anything