Applied Micro has made a foray into forbidding CPU territory with its announcment of a 64-bit "system-on-a-chip" architecture, as reported by James Niccolai of Computerworld at the Hot Chips conference. It will be tightly integrated as a module into servers, with either eight or 16 cores and have as much as 256 GB of memory built in.
"This has never happened in the history of our industry," Computerworld quoted Applied Micro president and CEO Paramesh Gopi. "For once we're not talking about CPUs, we're talking about a complete server-on-a-chip platform, and that is going to change the fundamental equation" for the cost of server ownership."
While ARM chips are in widespread use in consumer mobile devices, the server market is all but completely dominated by x86 chip-makers Intel and AMD.