Could a Californian start-up called Agnilux (meaning Fire and Light) be working on ARM-based processors for servers?
A fascinating piece in today's New York Times describes how a
PA Semi's founder was Dan Dobberpuhl a designer at DEC of StrongARM chips, similar to ARM-based processors which have been used in the iPhone and iPod Touch
One of the co-founders of Agnilux is Mark Hayter, COO of PA, who was a systems architect at PA.
According to the New York Times, the rumour is that Agnilux is working on a server chip for Cisco.
As well as attracting other PA people including, so it is rumoured, Agnilux's CEO, the new start-up has also bagged up a couple of defectors from Cisco
ARM has been saying for a couple of years that the server people have been looking at using ARM cores because of the prodigious amount of power being used by server farms where the machines are run by PowerPCs, SPARCs and x86 processors.
The concept of putting ARM based chips in servers apparently even has a name: physicalization. Funny to see how it is somehow the opposite of a previous buzzword: virtualization. (though both are not incompatible)
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2009/11/basics-of-physicalization.ars
MIPS/watts being an increasingly relevent factor for server performance, ARM may in the future really be well positionned for such markets, don't you think?
I'm sure you're absolutely right, Djonne, I've been hearing for years that the server people are looking at every which way to bring down power consumption. ARM's the natural choice.