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@ 2012/05/18Intel is going to face some serious competition next year when Freescale and ARM start to take it on in its home turf.
Freescale's blade servers are already starting to carve up Intel's share and, according to Electronics Weekly, ARM based systems will follow next year.
ARM will push into the server market with it next generation ARMv8 architecture, the first ARM architecture to include a 64-bit instruction set.
But what must be worrying Intel is some of its suppliers can easily introduce blades based on non-Intel processors and there are signs that they are starting to do that.
For example, the 40G ATCA payload blade, the ATCA-9405 is based on dual OCTEON II CN6880 processors from Cavium, each with 32 cnMIPS cores running at up to 1.5GHz.
Emerson's Katana QP blade is based on a single or dual MPC7448 Power Architecture processor running at up to 1.4 GHz.
This means that next year the market will effectively be chosing between three technologies and OEMs will be rolling out as many flavours as they can.
Great for the consumer, but not for Intel which will have to be sharing a customer base that it has, until now, had to fight AMD for.
Intel will most likely tout its history and promise future chip breakthroughs. Chipzilla is still ahead on the technology side of blade servers and it will take a bit of catching up from any rivals.
Freescale's blade servers are already starting to carve up Intel's share and, according to Electronics Weekly, ARM based systems will follow next year.
ARM will push into the server market with it next generation ARMv8 architecture, the first ARM architecture to include a 64-bit instruction set.
But what must be worrying Intel is some of its suppliers can easily introduce blades based on non-Intel processors and there are signs that they are starting to do that.
For example, the 40G ATCA payload blade, the ATCA-9405 is based on dual OCTEON II CN6880 processors from Cavium, each with 32 cnMIPS cores running at up to 1.5GHz.
Emerson's Katana QP blade is based on a single or dual MPC7448 Power Architecture processor running at up to 1.4 GHz.
This means that next year the market will effectively be chosing between three technologies and OEMs will be rolling out as many flavours as they can.
Great for the consumer, but not for Intel which will have to be sharing a customer base that it has, until now, had to fight AMD for.
Intel will most likely tout its history and promise future chip breakthroughs. Chipzilla is still ahead on the technology side of blade servers and it will take a bit of catching up from any rivals.
