14 DAY TRIAL // ARM Holdings seems to be really interested in getting into the desktop and server space, as the company's CEO recently reiterated ARM's plans to gain a foothold in these markets by 2015.
The announcement was made during a conference call that detailed the company's earnings and its future growth opportunities.
“The ARM Cortex-A processors support multi-processing and that delivers the high levels of performance required for server applications,” said Warren East, CEO of ARM Holdings, earlier this week.
“And in this space we have zero market share today and we have an ecosystem that we need to develop.
“So this is very much a potential opportunity and it’s market growth in the out years,” concluded the company's CEO.
As one of the slides provided explains, for the server and HPC market, ARM plans to build chips that work at frequencies in excess of 2GHz while also presumably carrying an impressive number of low-power cores.
Similar chips will be used to power desktop processors as well, ARM believing that this market also provides an important opportunity for growth “as the performance of ARM processors increases over the years and as the ecosystem develops.”
In addition, the adoption rate of such chips in the desktop space will be increased thanks to the support offered by companies such as Microsoft, who plans to make Windows 8 compatible with the ARM architecture.
Although ARM Holdings is one of the dominant players in the processor space, the company doesn't manufacture any CPUs.
Instead, it licenses its intellectual property to other companies, such as Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung or Texas Instruments, which build chips based on the ARM architecture.
Right now, most of the ARM-based SoCs (system-on-a-chip) that enter the market are destined to be used in smartphones, tablets and other low-power, low-performance computing devices. (via ZDNet)
