At the top of every CIO’s mind when it comes time to upgrade and/or expand hardware in the datacenter, is the simple metric of performance per watt per dollar. That is, these folks want the highest performance that they can get, in the smallest power envelope possible, all for the lowest cost of ownership. In the data-center, Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) has been the reigning champion of this delicate performance per watt per dollar equation with its well-known Xeon lineup, and has been taking market share from the likes of Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, and Oracle for years now.
The tides set to turn…again?
However, chip IP vendor ARM Holdings plc (ADR) (NASDAQ:ARMH) – one of the most successful growth stories in the semiconductor space over the last few years – has ambitions of enabling a wide set of ecosystem partners to compete in this space. To this end, ARM Holdings plc (ADR) (NASDAQ:ARMH) crafted a new 64-bit instruction set, a bunch of IP including system interconnects and processor cores that it hopes will allow its partners to gain share across the data-center.
While a good deal of optimism has been baked into ARM Holdings plc (ADR) (NASDAQ:ARMH)’s share price on the datacenter opportunity (shares trade for 31 times fiscal year 2014 projected earnings), as well as an equal amount of pessimism in Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s on that same ARM Holdings plc (ADR) (NASDAQ:ARMH) opportunity, I believe that this dynamic may be thrown into question following Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s recent launch of its Atom C2000 processors. Long story short, Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) is the first out of the gate with a high performance, low power set of highly integrated processors for parts of the data-center (low end networking, storage, and micro-servers), and preliminary performance data suggests that it will be very tough for Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s competitors to come close to matching Intel’s offerings.
Intel’s advantages are numerous
Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s advantages in the server space are formidable, even before we bring the actual merits of the products into the equation. For instance, the vast majority of the software base in the datacenter is designed for Intel Architecture (the formal term for the X86 instruction set), meaning that it costs time and money for datacenter operators to fundamentally switch (rewriting/recompiling software for a new instruction set isn’t easy). On top of that, Intel has significantly deeper relationships with key system partners such as HP and Supermicro, as well as the “roll your own datacenter” companies such as Facebook and Google.
In order to disrupt this type of relationship, an ARM-vendor (such as Applied Micro, AMD, or Calxeda) would need to offer processors that offered significant advantages in performance per watt per dollar. While there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the potential power efficiency of ARM Holdings plc (ADR) (NASDAQ:ARMH) products, the truth of the matter is that there is very little (if any) inherent “advantage” for either the X86 or ARM instruction sets – they’re just specifications. What determines power efficiency is the transistor technology upon which the chip is built and the quality of the actual design – two areas in which Intel holds very clear advantages over its competitors.
