The ARM architecture has been growing quite a lot on the mobile market, but the energy efficient RISC architecture is aiming a lot higher. According to new rumors Facebook is planning to skip Intel and build a server farm around the ARM architecture.
The server market is dominated by Intel and the Xeon family with almost unrealistic 93.5% of the total market. One of the reasons is its bottomless treasure chests.
The only other actor that has a share of the market is AMD with its 6,5%, down from 10.1% in Q2 2009. However, ARM may be entering soon.
The ARM architecture isn’t very well suited for big performance servers, but with its energy efficient architecture there are many interesting uses. According to recent stories, Facebook has concluded that ARM-based servers will save quite a lot of maintenance costs, compared to more powerful but also more power consuming Xeon servers.
Facebook will build the new serverfarm in Oregon and according to SemiAccurate most points to that startup Smooth-Stone will be contributing the ARM platform for the server farm. A work that recently acquired 84 million dollar in financing.
So far there is no official confirmation from ARM, Facebook or Smooth-Stone, but maybe it will be ARM that will break Intel’s near-monopoly and not AMD.
