Qualcomm unveils plans to enter CPU market

Qualcomm, a California-based semiconductor company, announced last week early specs for a new ARM-based data center system on a chip (SoC). The move comes as the chipmaker seeks to expand beyond mobile chips to server processors.

With this, Qualcomm seems to be entering into a direct face-off with Intel, which has dominated the market for years.

“Over the years, server processors have consolidated in the hands of a couple of heavyweights, so competition could do the industry some good”, the company said in a press release.

Qualcomm says that the SoC is one of the most advanced server processors and could be a “low-power alternative”. It can support a variety of data center needs, including infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a service, big data, and machine learning, which are increasingly embedded in the server computer world.

Qualcomm Incorporated through its subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and Xilinx, Inc., also announced a strategic technical collaboration to deliver industry-leading heterogeneous computing solutions with new levels of efficiency and performance through FPGA-enabled dynamic workload acceleration on Qualcomm Technologies’ server platforms.

Multi-phase technology collaboration with Mellanox Technologies has been also announced that brings Qualcomm’s server technology ecosystem one step closer to commercialization. As part of the collaboration, Mellanox will offer Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect solutions that, in conjunction with Qualcomm Technologies’ ARM instruction set based server CPUs, will be optimized for scalable server and storage infrastructures.