SANTA CLARA, Calif. – The Facebook-led Open Compute Project (
OCP) announced a specification for a plug-in board that can accommodate a variety of ARM- and x86-based server SoCs. Applied Micro Circuits Corp. and Calxeda are among SoC vendors contributing board-level designs that meet the spec and use their ARM SoCs.
With the news, Facebook becomes the first major data center to open the door to ARM SoCs in servers. An executive for the social networking giant told
EE Times late last year that Facebook might find some low volume roles for 32-bit ARM SoCs, but that it sees no widespread use of the architecture in host server processors until 64-bit parts are available, probably in 2014 or beyond.
Separately, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) announced it has financial services customers testing board designs it submitted to OCP last May. In addition, Mellanox is showing an integrated networking product for data centers at the Open Compute Summit here.
With OCP, Facebook is encouraging large and small data centers and their vendors to set common specs for servers and other data center gear to lower costs. Facebook competitors such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft specify custom server boards and other data center gear but don’t openly share details of those designs.
Applied Micro announced it developed a board design that uses its X-Gene 64-bit ARM server SoC and complies with the new OCP spec. The so-called Common Slot specification announced at the summit can accommodate all SoC architecture types.
Calxeda will show this week a 32-bit ARM SoC board that could be used as a storage controller for a disk drive array like this controller board in Facebook’s Open Vault. (To view a slideshow detailing Facebook's Open Compute project, click on the image).