VIA Challenges Intel and AMD on Server Market

It appears that a certain maker of microprocessors intends to increase its currently small stake in the worldwide chip market by beginning to offer processors for those servers where power efficiency is a prime concern.

The server market has always been a primary component of the IT industry, and it looks like its relevance is actually growing lately.

This is, among other things, owed to the way cloud storage space has increased in use, with even HDDs capable of automatically connecting to online storage environments now coming out.

The way more and more web-connected mobile devices, tablets and smartphones alike (and other things) have risen in number is also a cause for network managers to concern themselves with the Internet infrastructure.

Simply put, the rapid rate of web usage brings with itself the worry that the total world bandwidth could become strained.

As such, more and more servers and data centers are being created, with varying degrees of performance.

VIA decided to focus on the market for energy-efficient systems when it set up its latest server chip development plans.

The 64-bit Nano series of CPUs, based on the Isaiah architecture, support virtualization and Via PadLock security features.

That the line will feature quad-core models for notebooks and desktops (nettops mostly) has already been stated, but it now seems server units are going to be developed as well.

"Our processors have been used quite extensively in low power blades for data center applications, and we are currently evaluating our future strategy and roadmap," said Richard Brown, a vice president of Via Technologies.

With ARM also hoping to score server design wins, and with the possibility of its collaboration with AMD, there really might be a real competition soon. Still, VIA has given no official comment yet, so just what will happen, and how fast, is still unclear.