Boston Limited ships first servers using low power ARM designs

Boston Limited is doing its bit to shake up the server market with its Viridis servers, the first using ARM’s low power chip designs.

Boston says that the Viridis servers are the first of a new generation servers which will use chip designs from British firm ARM, forming the basis of its Calxeda Energy Core SoCs.

With a power consumption of just five watts per SoC, the chips are aimed at providing access to supercomputer performance but with only a fraction of the power drain.

This is an increasingly important characteristic, as analysis of ‘big data’ and other processor intensive applications that becoming more commonplace for a wider variety of businesses and organisations.

Using ARM designed Calxeda chips, the Boston Viridis servers can offer much lower energy consumption – around a tenth – of traditional x86 designs, which then impacts the cost of power consumption.  It will also the use of applications that otherwise would not be viable Boston says.

Although the main brunt of the ARM attack on Intel has been in the context of mobile computing Chipzilla faces a mounting challenge from ARM on the server front too.

ARM also announced a multiyear deal with foundry powerhouse TSMC today that will see the production and development of 64 bit FinFET server processors continue past the 20nm stage.