“On Tuesday, Austin-based startup Calxeda launched its EnergyCore ARM system-on-chip for cloud servers. At first glance, Calxeda’s SOC looks like something you’d find inside a smartphone, but the product is essentially a complete server on a chip, minus the mass storage and memory. The company puts four of these EnergyCore SoCs onto a single daughterboard, called an EnergyCard, which is a reference design that also hosts four DIMM slots and four SATA ports. A systems integrator would plug multiple daughterboards into a single mainboard to build a rack-mountable unit, and then those units could be linked via Ethernet into a system that can scale out to form a single system that’s home to some 4096 EnergyCore processors (or a little over 1000 four-processor EnergyCards).”
