Server chip vs. ARM hard drive intel dominant position

In the field of processor chip manufacturing, Intel is a well-deserved industry giant and almost monopolized PC processors. The Wintel alliance with Microsoft even dominated people's PC consumption habits. Mobile chip vendor ARM has begun to enter the server market in an attempt to break Intel's monopoly on the market. Although ARM processors have a 90% market share of mobile phone processors and a 70% market share of tablet processors, they do not have much share in the server field. Today, ARM processors want to compete with Intel for servers.

ARM has long intended to gain intel's server market share. ARM's 64-bit processor architecture ARMv8 supports larger memory and larger file processing. for users with high requirements for scientific research and search for large data, server chips in ARM architecture can reduce server energy costs and save a lot of power. ARM, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and other partners have launched some measures for intensive computing and cloud computing. These indicate that ARM is intended to challenge Intel's dominance in intensive computing and cloud computing.

ARM processors emphasize energy saving. According to HP's research, the biggest advantage of ARM servers is that, compared with traditional servers, ARM servers can save energy by up to 89%, occupy space by up to 94%, and reduce total costs by up to 63%. for giant data centers, electricity is their first expense, and ARM can save energy, that is, money. Recently, British IT vendor Boston launched the ARM-based new server "Viridis". The thermal design power consumption of a single processor is only 5 W, and the entire 2U server is only 300 W, it is equivalent to the power consumption of an ordinary PC, which is unmatched by x86 servers.

Intel emphasizes high performance. At present, Intel Xeon series Processors have been upgraded to quad-core and six-core Sandy Bridge EP/EN. in 2013, Intel will start the 16nm manufacturing process, and the new core architecture will also appear in 2014. It is also reported that intel is preparing a new Atom with eight cores to cope with ARM's challenges in the server field. The development code of the new processor is "Avadon" or "Abadon". It is manufactured using a 22nm new process and has a maximum of eight cores, dedicated to low-power server fields such as cloud computing. This processor will switch to a different architecture from today's new one. It has two pipelines and is executed in disorder. The performance can be improved by 20%-compared with the current product at the same frequency ~ 25%. It is estimated that it will be available by the end of 2013.

Intel has recently been working to reduce the energy consumption of processors. At the Intel Developer Forum 2012 conference, Intel officially announced official information codenamed Haswell microprocessor architecture. Intel said Haswell would bring a new revolution to personal computers. As Haswell's power consumption will be significantly reduced, Intel believes Haswell will be available on all types of PCs, including servers, desktops, laptops, and even tablets. Haswell significantly improves energy-saving performance without negatively affecting product performance. This indicates that Intel began to focus more on balancing power consumption and performance.

ARM and Intel have a dominant share in their respective markets. When the market is stable at a high level, penetration into other markets is in line with the market rules. As the controller of high-end chip technology, ARM and Intel are also bound to penetrate into each other's market. However, can ARM shake Intel's long-term high position in the server field?

ARM and Intel compete in power consumption and performance. In the server market, power consumption is not very sensitive. The customer is concerned with absolute performance, which is the performance power consumption ratio. Although ARM is outstanding in energy saving, its performance and power consumption are still inferior to that of Intel processors.

ARM neither designs nor produces or sells chips, but obtains profits by studying and selling core intellectual property rights. The partner receives technical authorization and then adds peripheral circuits and other functional modules based on the "ARM core" to design chips for different purposes. Intel is an enterprise responsible for the entire industrial chain from architecture, design, testing to production. In this business model, Intel controls the industry's technical direction and price trends, and has a deep foundation in the server field. ARM is difficult to compete.

In addition, due to Intel's long-term stable presence in the market, users use a large number of software that matches their processors. If you switch to the ARM architecture, a large number of software updates will become one of the obstacles. ARM's software ecosystem is weak, and the applicable software is expensive, while ARM and intel X86 are incompatible. If enterprise users need to maintain two separate software systems, the maintenance cost is not cheap. Intel's commercial solutions are more mature and users may not give up using Intel's processors easily.