With the dramatical increase of the performance level of its chips in the past years, ARM starts looking seriously at teh server market, beyond the juicy smartphone and tablet markets. The company is looking at the ultrabook market, as well as the server market, the latter being dominated by Intel, and AMD.


ARM announced to have sold licenses to two companies for manufacturing ARM CPU dedicated to servers. One of them is related to the ARMv7 architecture derived from Cortex A9, supporting only 32-bits instructions. The second license is based on ARMv8, the first one to support 64-bits instruction set while maintaining perfect compatibility with the previous generation. Such CPUs are even able to offer virtualization!
With very low power consumption, ARM could indeed enter the server market and become quickly popular for cloud system, where the number of CPU and their power consumption is more important than their individual raw power.
By linathael, original by Lionel