Continuing on with our quarterly updates to the ARM Server ecosystem, as usual there is quite a bit of news to report on! Let’s dive right in to the analysis!
The Qualcomm Centriq continues to make headlines, with the first design win recently announced. Hatch, a cloud gaming company, has chosen the Centriq 2400 to power it’s cloud gaming platform. More information is available here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2018/02/20/hatch-qdt-cloud-gaming/
Qualcomm is also in the news for another reason as well. Broadcom, another chip maker, has launched a hostile bid to takeover Qualcomm, although Qualcomm has thus far held off their unwanted pursuit, and is attempting to remain independent. Consolidation in the chip maker space has been picking up in recent years, with the NXP purchase of Freescale, Intel buying Altera, Macom purchasing Applied Micro, and many more.
Which leads to the next news in the industry: Macom had recently quietly sold off the Applied Micro assets to a secretively named buyer, known only as Project Denver Holdings. However, they have now formed a new organization, called Ampere, who will continue on with the development and marketing of the X-Gene line of ARM Server processors. More info on Ampere can be found here: https://amperecomputing.com/
Finally, Linaro’s 96Boards team has brought to market a development workstation conforming to their Enterprise Edition standards. The newly launched workstation features a 24-core Socionext Synquacer SoC, plus a hard drive, memory, and video card to round out the system. It is currently listed for sale at $1,250, so it is not cheap, but it does fulfill a niched that has been underserved in the market. It can be purchased here: http://www.chip1stop.com/web/USA/en/search.do?dispPartIds=SOCI-0000001