Day one of Open Compute Summit V, currently ongoing in San Jose California, reconnected John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, with Lakshmi Mandyam, Director of Server Systems and Ecosystems at ARM.

The first thing they all agreed on was the impact of this event which, compared to last year’s show, is bigger, better and generating a bigger vibe.

The mantra seems to be “let’s get the cost down and the performance up” and, in light of new developments, Mandyam thinks it is impossible to “do things the way you were doing them before. People are looking into ways to innovate and open compute provides a platform and a forum for them,” said Mandyam.

“ARM has been a part of it,” boasted Mandyam, “and we’ve been participating in several working groups. We’re seeing more and more solutions coming out in the market place and the software and the hardware ecosystem are coalescing.”

The question remains how do you optimize hardware and software together?

How do you optimize hardware and software together?

ARM is bringing things like integration, heterogeneous processing into play, and “whether you’re in a converged infrastructure world where you want to integrate multiple functionalities together, the degrees of freedom that you have with all the innovative choices from the ARM partners is pretty high,” explained Mandyam.

Prodded by Vellante to debate the segmentation of servers, the trends and the eventual change in dynamic, Mandyam stated that in her opinion a very important factor it’s going to be the NFV (networking function virtualization), which is being driven by mobile operators and STN.

“The rise of open source has opened doors for new architectures; the ARM partnership entering the market has already changed people’s perception of what’s possible; you’ll see that it’s going to drive a faster pace of innovation. Think of what happened in the phone ecosystem. It changed so much over the last five years in terms of what’s possible, and that’s been largely because there’s been a huge number of choices and innovation in terms of supply chain, in terms of new IP that’s being integrated. I expect to see the same thing happen in the data center space because now you have all these choices and people are innovating at different paces but it’s still overall accelerating the pace of innovation in the market,” said Mandyam.

“ARM has proven that the architecture works,” agreed Furrier. “The developers are adopting it, but I am interested in the enterprise because that’s a market that’s been dominated by Intel, and that’s where the demand is.”

Asked to put a “bumper sticker” on the show, Lakshmi chose “Don’t accept the status quo.”