Marvell announced it will start shipping 40nm multi-core ARM processors for servers this year. These new chips promise significantly higher power efficiency than competing x86-based solutions.
"We have on the road map quad-core symmetric multiprocressing enterprise ARM-based SoCs that will be here soon," said Simon Milner, vice president of Marvell's enterprise group. "There's a huge opportunity here because the market is x86 dominated and ARM can bring power consumption breakthroughs into this space," he said.
The new chips will offer more than a five-fold reduction in power consumption compared to x86 processors that dominate the server market, Marvell claims. Earlier this year, Marvell announced its Armada 310 that runs at a gigahertz while consuming 700 milliW and will scale to 2 GHz at less than a Watt, Milner said.
"We will springboard off that, tiling multiple cores in 40-nm technology with a rich set of I/Os and those will roll out this year," he said.