SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Expect ARM and Facebook to become data center friends at the Open Compute Project’s summit here Wednesday (Jan. 16).
Executives from ARM server SoC vendors Applied Micro Circuits Corp. and Calxeda will speak at the event. OCP is a Facebook-led project to define common specifications for data center servers and other gear, mainly at the board and system level.
Calxeda said it has become a member of the Open Compute Project and will show at the event its Project Knockout. The ARM-based board is geared to act as a controller for the hard disk arrays in the OCP’s Open Vault storage spec.
Separately, Calxeda and Avnet will show other data center designs they co-developed. The designs will be shared with the Open Compute community in the fall.
For its part, Applied confirmed its chief executive, Paramesh Gopi, will speak at the event.
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 it sees no widespread use of the architecture in host server processors until 64-bit parts are available, probably in 2014 or beyond.
Currently, Calxeda is shipping a 32-bit ARM server SoC and
plans to ship a 64-bit version in 2014. Applied said it is on track to sample its 64-bit ARM server SoC to key customers by the end of the quarter.
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