Texas Instruments, the company behind the Speak & Spell and the application processor in the Kindle, is joining the ARM-based server crush with a series of processor cores that will use the ARM IP from its cell phone business as well as its own digital signal processing chips to deliver high performance computing power to the data center. What’s most interesting about its foray into the data center market is that its cores also come with networking integrated onto the chip. The server chips are part of a series of chips that TI is calling its KeyStone multicore architecture.
This means that not only is TI confident that there’s a market for a new type of high performance computing chip (as well as one for webscale and cloud providers), but that TI thinks that integrating up to five 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports on that chip will make it more ideal for the new demands on data centers. As Tom Flanagan, the director of multicore strategy at TI said, the integration of 10-Gigabit Ethernet on the system on a chip means that the top-of-rack switch could be rendered moot.
via GigaOM
November 13, 2012
