HP is announcing today at HP Labs a major innovation in the server technology called “Moonshot,” a big shift from the x86 architecture to what HP calls “Extreme Scale
Computing.” The Moonshot announcement is featuring an ARM-based low energy server technology promoting advances in hyperscale.

The Moonshot project is an outgrowth of HP Labs research in Datacenter Smart Grid and HP’s EcoPOD products.

Using smart power efficient processor technology is mainly used in mobile smartphones not servers, so today’s announcement is monumental in the power efficiency game. In today’s legacy server market the big vendors have not yet “cracked the code” on doing high performance and energy efficient server technology.  HP’s Moonshot hopes to be that answer by putting this new technology in server class architecture.

HP’s Moonshot infrastructure is a federated management, fabric, storage, networking, power and cooling. That is tailored toward the use cases that require massive scale.The first partner in the new HP server technology is ARM based Calxeda. Other partners include Red Hat, ARM Holdings, Canonical, and AMD. Intel, a long time partner of HP, is not part of this announcement.

ARM plays an important role for certain HP products moving forward, as we learned last week that the two are teaming up on future projects.  It’s yet another area Intel’s being edged out of, as ARM readily prepares for the needs of a highly mobile and efficient environment.

In talking to HP execs, this represents a shift from PC-centric chip architecture to more relevant mobile chip sets. HP is looking to power cloud at massive scale. Datacenter footprint size, heat, and costs are the biggest drivers that growing companies are faced with. With new datacenter construction costs skyrocketing, the new requirements companies are facing continue to change to support mobile and new use cases like cloud and big data. This explosive growth is creating a crisis in scale, cost, and complexity.