Smooth-Stone Bets ARM Will Invade the Data Center

The Austin (Tex.) startup uses ARM-based chips to create computers for corporate data centers. Its goal: solve data-center power issues once and for all

By Stacey Higginbotham

Intel (INTC) has owned the corporate computing market for decades, thanks for its industry standard x86 architecture for computer chips. Now Barry Evans thinks it's time for a change.

Evans is CEO of Smooth-Stone, an Austin (Tex.) startup that uses ARM-based processors, like the ones found in smartphones, to create computers for corporate data centers. Its goal isn't a slight reduction in power efficiency, but to "completely remove power as an issue in the data center," says Evans.

The goals of Evans' stealthy company are overshadowed by one key question: Is ARM ready to invade the data center? Evans says yes. Looking at the technology behind Smooth-Stone indicates it's also apparently cooking up a way to use its chip architecture inside servers. Evans was coy about what Smooth-Stone is doing, but did say that the system the company is building isn't designed for the high-performance computing market and will use ARM-based chips. Ian Ferguson, director of enterprise and embedded solutions at ARM Plc (ARMH), declined to comment.

Evans was formerly an executive at Intel, where he worked in the chipmaker's ARM business unit; he stayed with the division after Intel sold the line of chips to Marvell (MRVL). Other members of the Smooth-Stone team hail from high-performance computing company Convex Computer and Newisys, a company that helped build the first server optimized for AMD's (AMD) Opteron chips, and which was purchased by Sanmina (SANM) in 2004.

Replacing Intel Chips

It's not enough to swap out x86 chips for those based on ARM and expect the new systems to work. For one thing, it takes a lot of low-power processors to equal the performance of Intel's powerful Nehalem chip for servers. An even bigger challenge is getting all of the processors to work together efficiently, a problem that another low-power systems company, SeaMicro, likely is solving as well with a machine that contains 512 Atom chips. When I asked Evans if Smooth-Stone had built a custom chip to handle the networking and coordination of the ARM-based chips, he said, "Our IP goes all the way down to the silicon level."

As for when the rest of the world will see this product, Evans declined to give a date, nor would he list customers. But engineers at Cisco (CSCO), Microsoft (MSFT), and Dell (DELL) have all mentioned Smooth-Stone in conversations, and appear to know something about what it's attempting.

I've written about how x86 may be on the verge of losing its dominance as mobile computing turns to ARM-based architectures and graphics processors from AMD and Nvidia move upmarket into high-performance computing.

Still, the commodity servers that populate the world's data centers (there are still a few specialty servers using Sun's Sparc chips or IBM's (IBM) PowerPC chips out there) seemed fairly safe from assault. There's a ton of software written for them. And the low cost of x86-based servers makes it hard to swap them out for specialized systems.

End of x86 Domination

Smooth-Stone's Evans doesn't deny the lure of commodity servers. Yet because of the need for companies to constantly buy more servers to meet rising computing demand, he's betting that the end of x86 domination may be in sight. I'm curious whether alternatives to commodity machines can make it inside the data center, and I'll be talking about it with some smart people at our Structure conference in June.

"Think of the installed base of servers and all of the new servers coming online," says Evans. "Most approaches today save 10% or 20% on power. Now imagine saving 99% on power and how completely that changes things, and takes power out of the equation."

If that's what Smooth-Stone can deliver, it could get CIOs thinking about branching out beyond x86.

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