Calxeda’s technology to power HP’s first extreme low-energy server development platform

AUSTIN, Tex., Nov. 1 -- Calxeda today unveiled its ARM-based “EnergyCore” Server-on-a-Chip, which consumes as little as 1.5 watts, the industry’s first server processor to achieve this milestone. Following HP’s announcement to incorporate Calxeda technology in its first-generation of extreme low energy server development platforms, Calxeda is launching EnergyCore at simultaneous events in Palo Alto, CA and Austin, TX. The news and product details, as well as Calxeda partner reaction and perspective, and replays of today’s webcast, can be found at www.calxeda.com.

The EnergyCore ARM-based SoC launched today will power a completely new breed of servers. Thanks to it’s mobile phone heritage and patent-pending innovations from Calxeda, the new processor consumes less than one tenth the power of today’s most energy efficient server processors and is ideal for workloads such as web serving, “Big Data” applications, scalable analytics such as Apache Hadoop, media streaming and mid-tier infrastructure such as caching and in-memory scalable databases.

“All the stars are in alignment: Web 2.0 data-driven businesses, cloud computing, open source portable software, power consumption at crisis levels and the emergence of server-class performance of ARM processors,” said Barry Evans, CEO and co-founder of Calxeda. “We believe a new era of energy-efficient servers is now dawning for scale-out workloads, and today we are introducing the foundational architecture that will enable this breakthrough. While we are proud to launch our Calxeda EnergyCore processors, we are even more thrilled with the many partners who are joining us on this journey.”

In an industry first, the EnergyCore processor SoC includes a supercomputing-class 80-Gigabit fabric switch and an integrated management engine with power optimization software, all on a single piece of silicon. The EnergyCore SoC also includes a full complement of server I/O features and a large 4MB ECC L2 cache, enabling system vendors, Calxeda’s customers, to offer a complete server node that consumes only 5 watts, including 4GB of ECC memory and a large capacity SSD.

“The HP-designed system contains 288 Calxeda servers in a single 7 inch (4 Rack Unit) chassis,” added Evans. “A single rack of HP’s Calxeda servers delivers the throughput of some 700 traditional servers and dramatically simplifies the infrastructure needed to hook them all together and manage the cluster.”

“For Web 2.0 companies to continually deliver new and innovative services, they must radically reduce the space, energy consumption and cost of their data center infrastructure,” said Glenn Keels, director of product marketing in the Hyperscale Business Unit at HP. “HP is incorporating Calxeda’s EnergyCore SoCs into the HP Redstone Server Development Platform for testing, developing and benchmarking hyperscale applications. Coupled with our HP Discovery Lab and the HP Pathfinder program of industry leaders, we can shape the future of Extreme Low Energy Computing.”

Many prospective Calxeda customers attended today’s event, including Niall Dalton, Director of High Frequency Trading at Cantor Fitzgerald, who said: “Companies in our industry are constrained by space and power, yet our appetite for analysis is insatiable. We need a 10X breakthrough and this could be it. We are evaluating the Calxeda technology in hyperscale throughput computing for data and simulation intensive applications. The Calxeda Linux platform enables rapid porting of our software, enabling us to quickly leverage the energy-efficient ARM cores and Calxeda's scalable communications fabric to scale our applications to new heights.”

Calxeda is Re-defining the Server

Calxeda’s EnergyCore architecture is based on a new model for scale-out computing that is:

• Efficient – Delivers a 10x increase in performance density to maximize ROI on limited space and power.
• Scalable – Integrated fabric switch on every chip lowers cost of interconnecting thousands of servers.
• Smart – An Embedded Management Engine delivers zero-touch, always-optimized power management that eliminates manual intervention and guesswork.

"The fundamental constraint in the world of massively parallel approaches to data management and analytics is power,” said Mark Shuttleworth, sponsor of the Ubuntu operation system, and founder of Canonical, a key Calxeda partner. “Today marks the beginning of a new way of thinking about what is possible in data and analytics. What is happening here at Calxeda and HP is the beginning of that revolution in the data center."

About Calxeda

Founded in January 2008, Calxeda brings unseen performance density to the data center on a very attractive power foot print by leveraging ultra-low power processors as used on mobile phones as a foundation for its revolutionary technology. Calxeda will make it possible for data center managers to increase the density of their computer resources while significantly reducing the need for power, space and cooling. At the same time, Calxeda technology will contribute to the reduction of the CO2 footprint of the data center in a significant way. Calxeda is funded by a unique syndicate comprising industry leading venture capital firms and semiconductor innovators, including ARM, Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners.

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Source: Calxeda