Chipzilla is mocking ARM's attempts to push its way into the server industry.
This week Calxeda and HP all had announcements relating to shoving ARM chips under the bonnet of servers. Word on the street was that Intel should be a little worried about ARM kicking Chipzilla in its meat and potatoes where it gets its bread and butter.
Intel's top server spinner Radek Walcyzk quickly got onto the blower to Wired to say he was totally relaxed about ARM's release.
Intel would like the public to know that the microserver phenomenon is real, and that Intel will own it with Xeon, and to a lesser extent with Atom, Walcyzk said.
Walcyzk agreed with ARM that microservers are well worth getting into. However it has been saying this since 2009, when the company announced support for the idea and began talking about it as a segment.
In those days it was just talking about the low powered Lynnfield but then it twigged that Atom would work rather well in the server space.
To be fair it took the efforts of SeaMicro, SupeMicro, SGI, and other system vendors had been shipping Atom-based server products to make Chipzilla see the light. However if Intel was late getting into work, ARM is still in bed thinking about having a shower.
Any ARM-based microserver movement will be playing catch-up for a while. If ARM is going to be big in the cloud then we should have been seeing prototypes like HP's Redstone materialise much earlier. It looks like that will not be around until next year.
ARM also has the problem that its microserver numbers are based on simulations and not real life. Chipzilla can show its punters more than two years of data from live cloud workloads running on x86-based production systems.
This is all FUD and bluster, as we're used to from Chipzilla. The truth is closer to Intel being terrified of ARM. And they should be. The future is clearly low power and mobile for a while and Intel simply hasn't answered the call.
Look for a new low power RISC-based design from Intel in the next year or two that will start the Mother Of All Lawsuits with ARM and their patent portfolio. Intel's only other choice will be to use the license with ARM, which they have but have no intention of actually using...
Probably...
int-el is again engaging in their only real talent, spewing blustering FUD.
They are great for light duty roles and are cheap.
The next closest I have to that is an AMD based ZBOX.