Marvell wins as Dell starts shipping ARM-based servers

LONDON – Dell Inc. said it has started shipping server computers called Copper based on the ARM processor architecture to selected customers. The servers are based on Marvell's quad-core Armada XP SoC products.

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Dell (Round Rock, Texas) said it was responding to demands from its customers for it to enable the development of an ecosystem for ARM-based servers and that it believes they are well suited to web-hosting front-ends and Hadoop environments. Hadoop is an open source software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications.

"The ARM-based server market is approaching an inflection point, marked by increasing customer interest in testing and developing applications, and Dell believes now is the right time to help foster development and testing of operating systems and applications for ARM servers," the company said in a statement.

Dell said it had began testing ARM processors for servers internally in 2010 in response to increasing customer demands for increased power efficiency and computing density.

Dell said it would be delivering Copper servers to partners such as Canonical and Cloudera to support their development activities.

The processors are Marvell-designed 1.6-GHz CPU cores that support both symmetrical and antisymmetrical multi-processing with hardware cache coherency and a 64-bit DDR2/DDR3 memory interface at an 800-MHz clock rate and 1600-MHz data rate. These devices also incorporate up to 2-Mbytes of L2 cache, Quad x4 PCI-express interfaces, multiple USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet ports, SATA, security engine and advanced power management techniques.


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