Smacking down speculation, ARM says it won't be competing in the server market against Intel and AMD until 2014. The company responsible for the majority of processors in today's smartphones simply does not believe its technology is ready to offer competitive performance and features available from the Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron lines. That being said, it is steadily working towards that goal.
"Work is under way: System designers are actively considering ARM architectures," Warren East, chief executive officer of ARM Holding, told Bloomberg. "We don't want to raise expectations that next year there are going to be a lot of ARM servers. Of course, there aren't."
This hasn't stopped rumors from running wild. ARM is supposedly close to introducing a new 64-bit micro-architecture that will be able to target servers. The micro-architecture alone is not enough to compete in the server world; ARM needs to build technologies that offer a favorable performance-per-watt ratio, security, virtualization, various input/output functionality, and so on.
ARM-based chips are known for their efficiency, suggesting that the company's entry point would be low-cost and low-power servers. That being said, it still won't be easy for the company, given that both Intel and AMD are working hard to decrease power consumption of their chips.