Qualcomm is ready for a slice of datacentre pie-- at its annual analyst day meeting the company confirms plans to expand beyond smartphone chips with processors designed for low-power server applications.
"This is something we're working on but not talking about for some time. Now, we are going to have a product that goes into the server," Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf says. "We're now at a point where a lot of the growth in the data centre tends to happen in areas where the operating system is already being written from scratch on Linux and driven by a smaller number of people who design their own data centre, are interested in alternatives [to x86] and interested in new architectures."
Details on what Qualcomm plans to off are scant, other than its being ARM-based. The company already makes a 64-bit ARM-based processor, the Snapdragon 805 smartphone CPU, even if the company admits there is more to server hardware than sticking a smartphone chip on a motherboard.
“It will take us awhile to build this business, but we think it’s an interesting business,” Mollenkopf says.
Qualcomm is also hopeful for its chances of success-- it projects the datacentre market will be worth $15 billion by 2020. However it faces stiff low-power server competition from the likes of AMD's Opteron A1100 and HP's Moonshot platform.
Go Qualcomm
Go Qualcomm CEO Mollenkopf Sees Big Opportunity in Server Chips (Barron's)
