Semiconductor chips for cloud computing

With the processor chips getting cheaper and that benefit is passing on to computing infrastructure such as servers and computers, emulating human brain on computers is becoming more possible. But here the challenge is designing software to exploit the available silicon. All these years the software was sold as package to individual user. But most of the time individual user need only fraction of the processor power of the computer. This opens the idea of renting software as services on a virtual computing environment, which is also called now as cloud computing. This way software can become cheaper due to renting of it rather than owning it.

When it comes to cloud computing, the software companies like Google and Microsoft reap more benefit from cloud computing rather than the chipmakers. Also among the chip vendors this opportunity benefits only few. Let's look at what are the type of processor chips required for cloud computing.

High performance energy efficient multi-core processors supporting both optical, wireless and copper interfaces are going to be at the core of servers supporting cloud computing. The smart architecture, which can multiplex the processing inputs to different processors cores and follow the process like a thread is the right one for cloud computers. So there must be multiple numbers of processor cores with high MIPS capability. RISC is better architecture compared to CISC. Another key important factor is memory interface. Advanced memory interfaces such as DDR3 will factor in as much as processor chips to increase the overall computing speed.

The most important is what's the electrical power semiconductor chips are consuming while churning the bits and bytes of streaming digital media and high speed telecom data packets. They not only have to consume low power and also dynamically change the power consumption pattern depending on the usage. It's not just 2 to 3 power consumption levels, it's going to be like we human being, consuming different amount of calories while doing different activities.

The semiconductor companies competing in this space include Intel and AMD with X86 architecture and IBM, AMCC and Freescale with PowerPC architecture. Mobile computing processor experts ARM and MIPS are not greatly visible in cloud. The newbies like Cavium and Marvell have potential to create a space in this market. When it comes high speed Optical, wired and wireless interface chip vendors, Broadcom, Exar, PMC Sierra, and Qualcomm are positioned to reap this market. In the memory and storage space, companies like LSI, Vitesse, Fujitsu, Rambus, and many number of memory and disk drive vendors benefit from cloud computing.