ARM manufactures high-performance mobile computing chips. Of course, these processors cannot match the performance offered by x86 processors but there’s something that still make them attractive, more attractive than x86 processors for server farms.

ARM’s  CEO Warren East said that servers based on ARM multicore processors should arrive within the next twelve months. The current architecture, designed for client-side computing, can surprisingly be also used in server applications.

Though the implementations of ARM have traditionally been aimed at relatively low performance optimized for minimum power consumption, but, we are seeing higher speed, multicore implementations now pushing up to 2 GHz. ARM’s A9 at 2 GHz has four cores, which makes them a viable candidate for servers. However, the main difference an ARM-based server processor would offer is the addition of high-speed communications interfaces.

No matter how fast these buses are, speed is definitely not an advantage ARM would offer. However, with a growing concern to reduce the amount of energy consumed by servers and server farms, ARM processors offer a great deal, especially the multi-core options in the higher range. ARM might solve part of the problem by offering a Green ServerFarm that would operate at less than 20% of the energy of the current Intel, AMD x86 server processors.

Obviously, we won’t see these processors being deployed in high-performance farms. What looks possible is that it might limit its options to the print and storage server market.

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The Experiment started on lighter Notebooks, then started to be known as Netbooks. Luckily, the idea prevailed and sales grew in number, and finally found a space in market as  new niche segment.

Now that Netbooks are popular, every chip manufacturer wants to jump-in. We’ve seen Nvidia’s initiative with Nvidia Tegra, and of course large no. of Atom based machines. So, why should ARM, most popular chip manufacturer for smartphones, stay back?

ARM announced that it will begin offering its customers ARM’s Cortex A9 processor on its 28nm process. This extends the reach of ARM’s top-end core, which is taking direct aim at Intel’s Atom.

GlobalFoundries, AMD’s subsidiary,  would work with ARM on a 28nm A9 implementation, and it’s a win for ARM because it makes any GlobalFoundries customers into potential ARM customers.

A bit of background: an system-on-a-chip (SoC) provider who is already using GlobalFoundries to produce its SoCs can more easily mix its own technology with ARM’s to produce SoCs based on Cortex A9. This is the same reason that Intel ported Atom to TSMC—so that existing TSMC customers can also mix Atom with their own IP to make Atom-based SoCs. (Of course, what was a shocking move for Intel is standard procedure for ARM, which is a fabless semi company whose total revenues are less than what Intel spends to develop one processor.)

The most interesting aspect of today’s announcement surrounds AMD as a possible Cortex A9 user, because AMD is still GlobalFoundries’ main customer.

Given that AMD was just in the ARM business and got out of it just 9 months ago, it’s seems unlikely that it will jump back in with another ARM-based SoC courtesy of GlobalFoundries. This is too bad, though, because there’s a ton of enthusiasm around A9-based “smartbooks,” and an A9-based Imageon would’ve provided a great basis for a high-powered, low-cost, long battery-life Linux portable. But AMD has gotten out of the SoC game just as it’s getting interesting.

Given the scope of GlobalFoundries’ ambition and the recent uptick in global semiconductor demand, this ARM announcement seems logical and timely.

Android developers had to build their applications that used to run inside Dalvik, the JVM (Java virtual machine) upon which Google’s mobile android OS is built. No doubt, it is beneficial in embedded systems with limited processor power and RAM, it is limiting for developers who, for example, want to create CPU-intensive, but not Memory-intensive, applications such as more in-depth computations, simulations, or high multimedia signal processing.

Google has now announced release of a native development kit, which will enable developer’s reach the ARM directly. With NDK out, called Android Native Developers Kit, a companion to the SDK. It gives developers a way to use the ARMv5TE machine instruction set, such as popular libc, the standard C library, libm, the standard math library, libz, the common ZLib compression library, the Java Native Interface (JNI), and liblog, which can send logCat messages to the kernel.

Exposing this to the developer’s now its possible to harness the compelte power of the ARM platform without having to worry about performance hits. But it’s not as easy as it seems. Things would go tougher.

Commenting on the NDK release, Google Android Developer’s Blog quoted:

“Keep in mind that using the NDK will not be relevant for all Android applications, As a developer, you will need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks, which are numerous! Your application will be more complicated, have reduced compatibility, have no access to framework APIs, and be harder to debug. That said, some applications that have self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don’t allocate much memory may still benefit from increased performance and the ability to reuse existing code…The NDK, however, can be an effective way to reuse a large corpus of existing C/C++ code.”