According to a report from Bloomberg News Service HP (NYSE:HPQ) will start manufacturing servers based on the ARM architecture in a sharp departure from its previous Intel-only design philosophy.
The processors for the HP servers will come from the startup Caxeda, which is partly owned by ARM. Caxeda is planning a quadcore processor based on the ARM Cortex-A9 design.
HP is not the first company to do ARM based servers. More than a year ago we reported that Facebook is doing the same thing, but the main difference is that the servers from Facebook are for internal consumption only.
This comes at the same time as sources have confirmed to SemiAccurate that Lenovo is mulling servers based on a MIPS design. The Lenovo servers that would, at least initially, be marketed in China would be based on a locally designed and fabbed chip also known as Godson.
Lenovo is mum on this and several requests for comments have not been answered by Lenovo. The departure from the x86 only architecture by both HP and Lenovo is a major blow for Intel, which has been the only supplier, together with AMD, to deliver chips to the two companies.
However, a major effort still remains to port software that is written for the x86 architecture to have it run on processors based on the design from ARM.S|A
Mads Ølholm
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