Computer chips built using ARM architecture have long had a place in cell phones and the mobile market due to their small process, low power draw, and cheap cost. Intel, on the other hand, makes the powerful workhorse x86, which dominates personal computers, servers, and high-performance computer systems (HPC.) Much alike to the story of the tortoise and the hare, however, ARM architecture is slowly building from a foundation of low power consumption and low cost to overtake x86—and it looks like they are drawing slowly into the HPC market.

GigaOM rounds up a large number of sources to analyze this trend,

We’ve written extensively about ARM’s success in mobile, even as Intel tried to move into that sector, as well as the growing interest in running servers using the ARM architecture. Seeing that, the hardcore, performance-oriented HPC world may soon succumb to the lure of low-power chips with x86-like performance (the latest ARM line offers 2.5 GHz), which makes me wonder how complete ARM’s success will be–and whether or not any of the current crop of ARM licensees will want to dive into the HPC pool. Maybe it will take a startup.

Linked in the article, in a story at InsideHPC, Thomas Thurston—President and Managing Director of Growth Science International, LLC—believes that ARM’s current momentum from mobile phones to netbooks into the commodity personal computer market will carry them past Intel’s blockade of the HPC market. ARM CPU gains show a clear trend matching Moore’s Law of Computing as they gain power over the years while remaining cheap and low-energy consumption.

He sees this trend as a dominating force that will deliver ARM processors into the realm of HPC computing by first making offers to niche markets that don’t need raw horsepower, but instead are concerned more about cost and infrastructure. While there’s little information about what that niche might be, I am betting on portable supercomputing being that niche—applications for data-crunching in the field on large vessels and vehicles (military and field science research applications make sense) as well as supercomputers for datacenters to offer for cloud computing. Right now, standard HPC systems have massive power consumption to go with their raw capability, which means infrastructure choices needs to be made for supporting them.

Cheap supercomputers are mimicked using large clusters and highly parallel cloud computing methods.

If ARM could supplant the lower end HPC market for cost and power consumption, they will have very large foot in the door.

There’s already been some clashes between Intel and ARM in the mobile market with the release of the Intel Atom processor earlier this year. And recently, SiliconANGLE reported on a (denied) rumor that Facebook might switch to ARM servers—Facebook’s servers, or any other Internet giant, would be a giant win for ARM.