The company expects micro-servers to sell well in 2015

Oct 4, 2012 09:31 GMT  ·  By

The world’s largest PC manufacturer, American company HP is also one of the largest server makers in the IT world. The company is working with Calxeda to build ARM servers, but it has strangely introduced Atom micro-servers first.

Intel is HP’s main partner so the whole Atom micro-server move may just be a courtesy gesture from HP, but it may also be because ARM’s 64-bit implementations were not ironed at the time.

The current Atom architecture is obviously inferior to ARM’s Cortex A9 design so competing with ARM SoCs based on the net Cortex A15 design is out of the question.

It’s obvious that the best choice for a micro-server architecture are ARM chips and the fact that DELL is also ready with its own ARM micro-server only strengthens that conclusion.

HP reportedly believes that micro-servers will conquer 15% of the server market in the next two years and this includes both, ARM and Intel Atom implementations, but our take on this is that there is no reason for Atom to be taken seriously as a micro-server alternative.

Intel is trying to fight back with what it does best: marketing and strong-arming, but the recently announced Atom Centerton is nothing else than a plain old low-performing Atom with a different name and a higher price.

As long as Intel will not be able to bring an architecture that’s more efficient than ARM, we see no reason for server versions to build Atom-based micro-servers as x86 legacy is irrelevant in this market sector.

HP’s willingness to stand up to Intel and go for an ARM solution is quite laudable and we can only hope that this will lead to a more price-competitive Intel as the company has now got used to overpricing its customers as we discussed here.