Smartphone chip champ Qualcomm says it's ARMed for server wars

Mobile chip heavyweight Qualcomm has confirmed that it plans to make a run at the server market, although details remain scant. Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf revealed that the firm is working on chips for the data center during a meeting with financial analysts in New York City on Wednesday, without giving away any specific …

[Anonymous Coward]

Their anti competitive practices are ubder investigation everywhere !

Well, at least in the US, the EU and China.

http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2014/november/qualcomm-subject-to-competition-probes-in-eu-and-us-as-well-as-china/

I think it goes like this 'Because everyone has to buy one of Qualcomms chips for their SOCs, Qualcomm on purpose make it cheaper just to buy a whole SOC.

It kills innovation.

[Mikel]

It would be good to see their weight thrown in

They definitely have it to throw.

Stacked designs show a lot of promise. Imagine moving to quad core 64 bit ARM with a decent GPU, 16GB RAM and 128GB stacked on top all in one package. Then mount them 8 or 16 to the module and see how tight you can jam them in to a rack.

[P. Lee]

Re: It would be good to see their weight thrown in

Better yet, go smaller and stack more on a card. 8G RAM, no GPU and iscsi disk would be my take on it. Make them small enough to not worry about ditching machine virtualisation and allow them to be powered on and off quickly.

First things first though - we need a common architecture to do uefi's/PCIe bus function.

Then we need a desktop version with GPU. Perhaps some monitors with USB3 interfaces you could plug a stick straight into to give KVM+USB capabilities.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: It would be good to see their weight thrown in

Then we need a desktop version with GPU

I'm pretty certain we don't need those before the server chips come out. Desktop machines need the OS and all the apps compiled for the architecture, data centres just need a compiler.

For large customers (say Facebook) it might make financial sense to do one-off SoC runs (up to a million units). But, your other point about UEFI and other low-level support is probably the biggest hurdle left for ARM to take. Once that falls then the price advantages of ARM will be very hard to ignore.

[Zed Zee]

Re: It would be good to see their weight thrown in

Or better still, Facebook can go to one of the Far East ODMs and get ARM boards made for them at a fraction of the cost that Qualcomm would charge and stuff them into their hyperscale DCs.

Facebook doesn't need Qualcomm - just like they don't need IBM, HP, Dell or Windows for their Intel servers.