Just a few years ago the brand name Qualcomm was unheard of by millions of people around the world but nowadays chips made by the company sit in almost all mobile devices, be it a smartphone, a tablet or something else. Qualcomm is by no means satisfied with this situation – the company has announced plans to enter the server market with its own server chips!
Now don’t get too excited – you will not see x86 chips made by Qualcomm as the upcoming company server chips will use the same old and good ARM architecture but even then the US company has an ace in its sleeve – power consumption. While Intel server chips provide lots of raw performance, they tend to consume a lot of electricity and emit too much heat. Qualcomm will not be able to match Intel’s performance but its ARM chips sip energy and do not need expensive cooling solutions. In fact Qualcomm believes that stacking hundreds of ARM chips in one place instead of just a few Intel processors will bring better performance, especially when multithreaded, and lower power consumption.
Qualcomm has not shared any information on a possible release date for its first server processors but if such an event ever takes place it will likely happen next year.
Source: The Register