nullplan wrote:
Sorry, but no-one will switch architectures just for them.
Normally I would agree, but the market is awaiting server ARM CPUs for years now, so there's definitely a niche here. More than 90% of the servers are running some kind of Linux, and ARM support in Linux is old and mature. Changing the arch in this specific case wouldn't be a big deal.
nullplan wrote:
For two, knowledge of low-power CPU design is unlikely to help with datacenter CPUs where power is rarely an issue.
I'm not so sure about that. You have no clue how horribly huge electric bills some company get every month.
nullplan wrote:
You want to design a mobile CPU for as little power use as possible. Latency may be a close second. A server CPU however doesn't care about power use (as much) and is more interested in throughput than latency.
I agree, and you're right that power usage often lowered by sacrificing latency on mobiles. Small latency and large thourhgput is much more important for server CPUs, however power consumption is also. Lowering the electric bill means maximizing the profit, something that all IT companies are interested in, which creates a potential market for these guys. Imho ARM itself is perfectly capable to make similar throughput and latency as current server CPUs (maybe even better, considering the simpler instruction decoding and RISC nature). So the real question is how the SoC is manufactured.
I wish them luck, and I hope existing companies won't kill them in their early state.
Cheers,
bzt