Cool chips aim for the datacentre

Start-up hopes to challenge big three chip firms

A new company, PA Semi, is to challenge Intel, AMD, IBM and Sun by developing a low-power processor. Chips that draw less power are much needed to combat overheating in datacentres and the high price of electricity.

PA Semi has 150 staff and executives with experience at Digital, AMD and other chip makers. The firm last week unveiled details of a dual-core 2GHz 64bit processor called PWRficient, which it said integrates networking yet still offers about a ten-fold power dissipation advantage over today’s chips. Depending on application, PA claims that between five and 13 watts will be dissipated. The first chips are due to sample late next year and single-core and four-core variants are planned for 2007.

Performance-per-watt has become an important criterion as more firms adopt blade servers that send datacentre temperatures soaring and can lead to kit failure. Also, escalating electricity prices mean many hosting firms factor in power consumption when setting tariffs.

The PWRficient family is based on IBM’s Power instruction set and, as with Power, PA expects deployments on everything from games consoles to supercomputers via embedded controllers.

“Low power is very important in datacentres as electricity is becoming one of the highest costs – firms like APC are building big businesses around heat dissipation,” said Martin Hingley of analyst IDC. “It’s odd that they’re not doing x86 though Intel, AMD and Sun are also attempting to improve performance-per-watt metrics.”

Other vendors are targeting niches. Azul Systems, for example, has developed a chip specifically for Java application server processing.