LONDON -- Dell Inc said it has started shipping servercomputers called Copper based on the ARM processor architecture to selectedcustomers. The servers are based on Marvell's quad-core Armada XP SoC products.
Dell (Round Rock, Texas) said it was responding to demandsfrom its customers for it to enable the development of an ecosystem forARM-based servers and that it believes they are well suited to web-hostingfront-ends and Hadoop environments. Hadoop is an open source software frameworkthat supports data-intensive distributed applications.
"The ARM-based server market is approaching aninflection point, marked by increasing customer interest in testing anddeveloping applications, and Dell believes now is the right time to help fosterdevelopment and testing of operating systems and applications for ARMservers," the company said in a statement.
Dell said it had began testing ARM processors for serversinternally in 2010 in response to increasing customer demands for increasedpower efficiency and computing density.
Dell said it would be delivering Copper servers to partnerssuch as Canonical and Cloudera to support their development activities.
The processors are Marvell-designed 1.6-GHz CPU cores thatsupport both symmetrical and antisymmetrical multi-processing with hardwarecache coherency and a 64-bit DDR2/DDR3 memory interface at an 800-MHz clockrate and 1600-MHz data rate. These devices also incorporate up to 2-Mbytes ofL2 cache, Quad x4 PCI-express interfaces, multiple USB ports, Gigabit Ethernetports, SATA, security engine and advanced power management techniques.
This story was originally posted by EE Times.
