Karl Freund - HP Moonshot 2013 - theCUBE
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 08/04/2013

The Calxeda platform is extremely power efficient and energy efficient. Lowering costs, increasing density and lowering power, are three benefits you'll hear both Calxeda and HP use when describing their products. Karl Fruend, VP of Marketing at Calxeda, stopped by theCUBE to discuss at a high-level what HP's annoucement of HP Moonshoot 1500 means with show hosts John Furrier, Founder, SiliconANGLE and Dave Vellante, Chief Analyst, Wikibon.

HP is innovating the server from the ground up. In order to do so effectively, it needs partners like Calxeda in its Pathfinder Innovation Ecosystem. Calxeda-based Moonshot servers have up to 180 quad-core EnergyCores in the 4U Moonshot server chassis at 1.4 Ghz. From Calxeda's News Release:

These new units are so efficient that a four core version, packing 4GB DRAM, consumes just five watts at full pelt — for perspective, that's less than your average tablet. The other funky innovation is that all the server nodes now share a single power, cooling, management and storage system rather than carrying it themselves. In terms of space saving, the Redstone four unit chassis you can see in the image above can hold 288 of the little blighters.

Fruend believes that, server side we are seeing a radical shift, not an incremental one. Furthermore he gave a point of reference: "Did you think you'd have a mini super computer in your purse/wallet 5 years ago?" The revolution in the mobile and 'Internet of Things' spaces is causing a revolution in the data center. ARM business model enables a lot of this innovation too.

A segment that Fruend sees blowing up is genomic sequencing. Personally, I can attest to this with companies like 23andme (I've used) popping up. The idea of predictive health being done more efficiently by faster and 'easier' server activity is an idea I think we all support. Categorizing data, researching genomes, and long-term predictive support for ailments based on genealogy is a very interesting space to watch (in my personal opinion).

Based in Austin, Calxeda now has offices in China and Silicon Valley. Its first generation product has been in production for the past 6 months. Calxeda expects to have a 64bit product available in 2014. Core is a commodity and Calxeda will continue to commoditize the Core. Their strategy is to continue to use standard ARM cords in that commoditization.

As people and applications move to the cloud, and as the 'Internet of Things' moves to the cloud, software paradigms are changing. Calxeda in partnership with HP on the HP Moonshot project is well positioned to continue moving that ball down the field.

Karl Freund, Calxeda, at HP Moonshot 2013 with John Furrier and Dave Vellante.