Company: Calxeda
The Basics: Founded in 2008 (as Smooth-Stone). Privately held, VC-funded. Based in Austin, Texas.
What Calxeda Does:
Manufactures low-power "EnergyCore" microprocessors, based on ARM designs (most commonly used for chips found in mobile devices), which consume much less power than typical x86-based designs.
Server vendors will use Calxeda chips - each with four 32-bit ARM cores - in highly parallelised systems for data intensive applications, running Linux and Java. HP has built its Redstone platform with 288 Calxeda chips in a single 4U server for application development purposes. Calxeda-based servers should ship in production by the end of this year.
Big Data Play:
According to the company: "The EnergyCore processor consumes less than one tenth the power of today’s most energy efficient server processors and is ideal for workloads such as web serving, Big Data applications, scalable analytics such as Apache Hadoop, media streaming and mid-tier infrastructure such as caching and in-memory scalable databases."
According to Niall Dalton, director of high frequency trading at Cantor Fitzgerald: "We need a 10x breakthrough and this could be it. We are evaluating the Calxeda technology in hyperscale throughput computing for data and simulation intensive applications. The Calxeda Linux platform enables rapid porting of our software, enabling us to quickly leverage the energy-efficient ARM cores and Calxeda's scalable communications fabric to scale our applications to new heights.”
Partners include: Couchbase, DataStax, MapR Technologies, Pervasive, uCirrus.
More: www.calxeda.com.
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