ARM CEO is bullish on server opportunities

CEO OF ARM Warren East has talked up the firm's technology as key for solving the rising costs associated with running server farms.

Speaking at the IP Expo event in London on Wednesday attended by The INQUIRER, East used his opening keynote session to discuss the firm's aims in the server market.

He said ARM believes that improving efficiency and reducing energy consumption of servers is vital to the future technology landscape, as the number of servers in use rises to meet the demands of consumers and enterprises.

"We are seeing server volumes growing significantly. Studies suggest that for every 600 smartphones in use a server is created, and the number of smartphones in use rose by a third last year, so there's huge amounts of electricity being used by servers," he said.

"That means huge increases in the amount of emissions produced by the energy needed to drive this. And the costs for datacentre operators are going to increase hugely. In fact already ICT in its entirety uses about 10 percent of the electricity that we generate on this planet."

East said that as this demand for data on servers continues to increase, it is not feasible to imagine that companies can just build ever-bigger datacentres and buy more servers. Instead, new servers that are more efficient are required, he added.

"So in 2008 we looked at this opportunity and decided that in theory we could reduce the amount of energy consumed by servers, as a third of the energy used in servers is on the processing side, getting data in and out of the microprocessors," he explained.

"So by reducing the power of the microprocessor itself you can save a lot of energy use in the CPU, we think we could save two-thirds of the energy consumed."

This article was originally published on V3.