ARMed warfare on the server: Intel versus AMD plus world?

Live Chat Underdog, disrupter and casualty – AMD’s been on a rollercoaster ride in its battle against Intel.

AMD rose on the strength of its 64-bit, x86-compatible server processors as Intel was penalised on Itanium; Intel re-bounded with the Xeon E5 as AMD got dragged down by IT spending cuts and problems with its Barcelona Opterons.

Intel up, AMD down; order has been restored to The Force.

Or has it? AMD this week opened a new front by jumping on the freshest, most fashionable idea to hit servers since SSD: ARM. It became an ARM licensee.

AMD is the latest to go ARM: Hewlett-Packard and Samsung are in the ARMs race, too, while Ubuntu-shop Canonical’s tuned its Linux to run on ARM servers.

Has the geekiest and most under-the-covers of British tech success stories finally come of age? Are ARM servers about to become a reality?

What does it mean for Intel, AMD and server-makers? Can a company whose chip architecture owns smartphones really scale up to running the cloud?

Join The Reg’s big-iron man Timothy Prickett-Morgan and fellow Reg readers for an ARM server Live Chat on Friday, 2 November at 2pm GMT, 10am Eastern, 7am Pacific, to speak your brains. You can register in the window below to follow and to join the discussion.

We’ll be talking the who, the what, the where, and the why:

• Should Intel be worried?
• What can a RISC server do that a CISC server can’t?
• Is the x86 server doomed?
• Who will use ARM servers, and where?
• Speeds, feeds, performance and big, big IRON!