Baidu, which is often called the Google of China, has apparently won the race to become the first company to deploy servers based on ARM smartphone chips in a “large-scale” production environment in its data center.
It’s using a custom version of Marvell’s low-power 32-bit quad-core Armada XP CPU Server-on-a-Chip (SOC) in a personal cloud storage system called Baidu Cloud or Baidu Pan.
It’s unclear whether any other kind of server is being used to deliver the service.
The boxes themselves, called “easy-to-integrate,” were run up by an unidentified Asian ODM.
Marvell, like the other dozen or so ARM fabricators, is hoping to eventually challenge industry-standard x86 servers, a situation Intel would rather avoid. ARM has forced Intel to try to cut its inefficient power consumption.