Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), which indicated in November 2014 that it would push into the server chipset market dominated by Intel, demonstrated its Server Development Platform (SDP) product, which it said is now sampling to Tier 1 data center customers. The system includes a pre-production version of 24-core system-on a-chip (SoC) based on the ARMv8-A instruction set, according to the silicon giant. In two separate announcements, the company also disclosed technology collaborations with both Xilinx and Mellanox. The new product is targeted at "hyperscale" data center customers and is designed to tackle some of the most common data center workloads, including Infrastructure as-a Service (IaaS), Platform as-a Service (PaaS), big data and machine learning.
It's a big market and Qualcomm wants a piece of it, especially as smartphone growth starts to slow down in developed markets and even in China. As Fortune notes, Intel had $14.4 billion in data center revenue in 2014. Qualcomm wants to be an alternative. "There is not a real alternative for them at this time," Qualcomm Senior Vice President Anand Chandrasekher said at an event in San Francisco, according to Bloomberg. "This is a good time for a new entrant to come in." Release