ATIC, the Abu Dhabi investment company backing Globalfoundries, has got together with Texas Instruments, ARM and venture capitalists Highland Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures and Flybridge Capital Partners to develop ARM-based processors for servers.
Together they have put $48m into the two year-old company Smooth-Stone be based in Austin, Texas. CEO of Smooth-Stone is Barry Evans, a 20 year Intel veteran who went with the sale of the X-Scale group to Marvell.
"Power consumption matters more than ever," says Evans, "Smooth-Stone will bring the low-power virtues of mobile phone technology to servers and data centers. Its semiconductors and software will provide a solution for companies where energy consumption by servers has become a constraining and expensive issue by increasing the density of computer resources while significantly conserving energy, cooling and space in the data center. Smooth-Stone customers will have new, unseen options as they plan their future server deployments. "
"Our goal is to completely remove power consumption as an issue for the data center. Imagine that change for companies with a large presence on the Internet," adds Evans. "they all deal with the reality that as the mass of information grows daily, so does their power consumption. Every day these companies are thinking about managing their data center sprawl. We want to make sure that space and power are not constraining their potential."
Evans had been general manager of the application processor business unit in the handheld platform group at Intel, working on getting ARM-based chips into hand-sets. Intel had obtained an ARM architecture license when it bought part of DEC. It called its ARM-based processors X-Scale.
Intel sold the unit to Marvell for $600m, and Evans became associate vice president and general manager of the application processing business unit in the cellular and handheld group at Marvell.
"The necessity of finding more energy efficient server solutions for data centers has created an enormous and truly revolutionary opportunity for the industry," says Ken Lawler of Battery Ventures, "we recognised from the beginning that Smooth-Stone had the innovative technology, the customer value proposition and the engineering and management capability to disrupt the web server landscape. Working with management, we’ve put together a unique investment structure and syndicate of both strategic and traditional venture capital investors that gives the company what it needs to succeed in this highly competitive market. "
ARM has been talking to server manufacturers for several years about getting their processors into server applications where they would reduce the huge amounts of power used by data centres using servers based on x86 chips.