Well, those startups now have seriously heavyweight competition in the form of LogMeIn, the remote connectivity specialist, and ARM, the British firm whose low-power chip designs underpin the vast majority of mobile devices, and which is now competing with Intel to own the IoT space.

LogMeIn has just launched its own PaaS for the internet of things, calling it Xively (the beta version was known as Cosm). And developers wanting to start creating connected devices on this platform are being offered the Xively Jumpstart Kit, which combines Xively with ARM’s mbed platform, for building devices using ARM’s microcontrollers. With this kit, the companies promise, developers can “rapidly progress from prototyping to volume deployment”.

Xively is based on LogMeIn’s Gravity infrastructure – the same one used to support the company’s cloud storage offering, Cubby — and it comes with development tools for writing and prototyping services, a provisioning engine for deployment and a scalable management console. It supports real-time messaging and directory and data services, as well as analytics, and it uses a “pay-as-you-grow” pricing model that should make the platform attractive to startups.

The directory services extend to a “commons” named the Xively Connected Object Cloud, through which different companies’ devices can interconnect. According to LogMeIn, a “fundamental philosophy” baked into the Xively terms of service states that “customers own their data and can choose whether or not to share all, part, or none [of] it.”

A showcase page for the platform shows early projects built on Xively that include the Visualight smart lightbulb and even some of the post-Fukushima crowdsourced radiation-monitoring efforts (which used an earlier iteration of the platform, called Pachube at the time).

While the Xively Jumpstart Kit should help inventors and developers gravitate in ARM’s direction, it’s not like Intel is sleeping. Intel said in February that its own Intelligent Systems Framework – a set of specifications for connecting, managing and securing IoT devices – had been used to support more than 50 products. The company also released new software tools for, you guessed it, reducing time to market.

Although ARM does benefit from a much broader ecosystem than Intel, it’s too early to call that race. However, those startups trying to build their own PaaSes for the internet of things had better get a move on. LogMeIn’s offering is already pretty mature for this space and, given the momentum rapidly building behind the IoT movement, its timing is exquisite.

(Incidentally, the internet of things is a subject that will be discussed at our Structure 2013 event in San Francisco on 19-20 June, so be there.)

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Unlike Intel at the other end of silicon spectrum, ARM doesn’t build or fabricate chips. Instead, it designs the chip architecture and receives license and royalty fees from companies that use the designs. Apple’s A-line processors, Samsung’s Exynos and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips, for example, are all based on ARM designs. Essentially, every new smartphone or tablet — with a few rare exceptions — runs on a ARM-based chip.

As a result of high demand for mobile computers, the shipment of ARM chips is up 35 percent from a year ago. That figure shows a sharp contrast with higher-performance desktop and laptop computers: smartphone sales passed those of the PC sales in 2011 and I’m on record suggesting that tablet sales will do the same later this year. Is it any wonder that some are dubious about Intel’s future in the mobile market, given that ARM-based chips have it wrapped it up for now?

Intel is making some progress with its Atom chips but ARM continues to dominate and grow the mobile segment. The company now has 973 revenue-generating licensees, with 22 of them signed this past quarter. If the market for wearable gadgets takes off — as I suspect it will, although it’s really just getting started — ARM seems poised to continue powering most mobiles for some time yet.

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The goal of Project Moonshot, as initially stated in November 2011 and reiterated seven months later, is to offer super energy-efficient and compact servers capable of running the world’s biggest webscale (and biggest enterprise) workloads at a fraction of the cost of current hardware. HP said it shipped a number of early versions for customer proofs-of-concept last year but today’s news represents broad availability of what HP execs called a “software-defined server designed for the data center.”

The new server puts 4,500 Proliant servers into one HP 1500 enclosure. Compared to traditional Proliant (DL-380) servers, this iteration uses 89 percent less energy, 80 percent less space and is 97 percent less complex than the former state of the art at 77 percent less cost.

It’s understandable, given HP’s huge server installed base in enterprises, why it lays out that particular comparison, but customers might be more interested in how Moonshot boxes compare with webscale servers from what used to be no-name rivals like Quanta, Inventec, and Wistron. Increasingly, those are the servers that are being forklifted into massive data centers.  The notion of BYO servers is also spreading. In January, Rackspace, the big hosting and cloud provider, for example, said it would start building its own servers.

That trend puts traditional server vendors like HP, Dell and IBM in a tough spot. It’s good to see HP willing to cannibalize its existing products — if it doesn’t someone else will eat its lunch anyway. But,the macro issue is whether most of those big web-scale workloads have already moved onto new “no-name” servers or plan to do so. It is clear that for many of these new companies, the name on the box is not as important as the box itself and very few webscale customers appear willing to pay a premium for a label.

Moonshot servers are based on underlying fabric from HP networking, said Mark Potter, VP and GM of HP’s industry standard server (ISS)group. “This SDN switching is OpenFlow enabled so you can rapidly connect these computer architectures to any network,” he said during Monday’s web event. HP  is now running both 32- and 64-bit ARM-based Moonshot servers in the lab, he added.

Facebook outlined its wish list for webscale enclosures and servers which it pushed into the Open Compute Foundation. HP is part of that effort but it was unclear to me whether Moonshot servers will be fully Open Compute Project (OCP) compatible.

Update: Jim Ganthier, VP of marketing and operations in HP’s server group, confirmed that Moonshot is not OCP compatible but said the new servers would be great for powering similar webscale workloads.  He also took exception to the notion that HP server marketshare is being eroded by white box makers. Existing HP servers “power 8 out of 10 of the world’s most visited web sites and 3 out of 4 of the biggest social media sites,” he said. In addition, he said research like that from Gartner and IDC that shows branded servers — including HP boxes — losing ground to white box ODMs came out “before the world knew about Project Moonshot.”

So we’ll have to wait and see.

This report was updated at 9:19 a.m. PST with more detail on the servers and again at 12:55 p.m. PST with additional HP comment.

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Dubbed the X-Gene server on a chip, the product has been touted by Applied as the first 64-bit-capable ARM-based server in existence, the ideal part for webscale users (check out the pic of Facebook’s Frank Frankovsky holding one up) and also the future of Applied Micro. It’s the first chip to contain a software-defined network (SDN) controller on the die that will offer network services such as load balancing and ensuring service-level agreements on the chip. It’s like shoving the networking and computing vision of the Cisco Unified Computing System on a chip.

This is a big deal. Although the first generation won’t have enough bandwidth to eliminate the need for a switch at the top of a rack, the following generation will.

Paramesh Gopi, president and CEO of Applied Micro, said that these new chips have now made it past the prototype stage (the board in the picture uses an FPGA instead of a production silicon) AND are now in the hands of several customers, including Dell and Red Hat. Gopi expects physical servers containing the X-Gene to hit the market by the end of this year.

Gopi’s big bet

The chip is manufactured at 40 nanometers and contains eight 2.4 GHz ARM cores that Applied has designed, four smaller ARM Cortex A5 cores running the SDN controller software (the pink bit on the block diagram below), four 10-gigabit ethernet ports, and various ports that can support more Ethernet, SSDs, accelerator cards such as those from Fusion-io or SATA drives. In short, this a chip that combines networking and computing in one package.

When about asked about the power consumption of the chip, Gopi said it will run at 50 percent of the total cost of ownership of a comparable x86 product, but wouldn’t discuss actual power consumption.

“We’ll be able to run your LAMP stack and SQL jobs on Xeon-class ARM cores, and the routing protocols and such will be running on the Atom-class ARMs,” Gopi said. “It’s the fundamentals of a rack on a single chip.”

Building this chip has taken four years. It required Gopi to visit ARM at its U.K. headquarters to convince them to give him an architecture license to build a chip for servers. In an interview with me at the Open Compute Summit in January, Gopi explained that he saw the flexibility and the architecture that ARM offered could become an asset for webscale computing, so he embarked on turning Applied Micro, a public company with a few hundred million in revenue, into a startup.

Like others, such as Barry Evans of Calxeda or Andrew Feldman of Sea Micro, he saw that power issues were raising the cost of operating data centers — and cutting into the bottom line at web businesses — and he thought he had a solution. His solution was to get an architectural license from ARM, so he could make a 64-bit-capable chip ahead of ARM’s plans to introduce that powerful a core. ARM introduced that core last year, and vendors of ARM-based server chips such as AMD and Calxeda expect to have 64-bit-capable chips next year. But Applied is shipping those machines today.

“We’ll end this wimpy core vs. brawny core debate once and for all,” Gopi said.

The new hardware mindset

Applied Micro CEO Paramesh Gopi.

The mobile industry has relied upon the common ARM architecture to build a wide variety of chips that give each vendor a slightly different set of features. Both Nvidia and Qualcomm start with ARM cores (hell, even Apple has an ARM architectural license) to build their application processors. This lowers the cost of designing chips, because engineers can start from a higher level when solving problems.

And the modularity of the ARM cores combined with an architecture license also means firms can customize their designs for a certain market without spending a huge amount of time or dollars. Gopi will actually address some of this at our Structure event June 19 and 20, in a presentation on designing hardware at the speed of software.

For Applied, this dynamic plays out in the existence of a new type of chip for the data center, but also in the fact that in nine or 12 months Applied plans to test the second-generation X-Gene chip, one that will support 100-Gigabit Ethernet and will obviate the need for a top-of-rack switch. Ironically, this architecture probably won’t be a welcome development for Applied’s existing networking clients like Cisco and Juniper.

But it’s clearly the direction that large webscale customers want to go. And the second-generation architecture is also important for the first-generation X-Gene products, because without it, Applied may not have a chance at getting technically savvy and forward-looking potential customers that need not just a single interesting product, but a real understanding of the roadmap before they commit to a new architecture.

So even as Applied ships these first products to customers for use in devices that hit the market at the end of this year, it’s already developing its production of the next generation 28-nanometer versions of the heavy-duty ARM cores and 100-Gigabit-capable networking while prepping for later versions that may include photonics and other elements that data center customers are already discussing as tomorrow’s technology.

It took a bold vision — and that trip to ARM — for Gopi to get Applied Micro to the table as these discussions about the next generation data center are playing out. But with this design, it has earned a seat. Now all it has to do is earn the business.

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East, 51, has been CEO at ARM since 2001, although he has been at the firm since 1994 (he was originally head of ARM’s consulting business, then business operations chief, then COO). Segars, 45, has been at the company even longer – since 1991, shortly before Apple incorporated the ARM6 design into its Newton PDA. Like East, Segars is an engineer who evolved into sales and business development roles.

Both men are largely responsible for turning ARM, once a mere spinoff of Acorn Computers, into what it is today: Intel’s nightmare. For not only does ARM dominate in the mobile device, which is in itself supplanting Intel’s desktop base, and in embedded processors, but it is even squaring up to the x86 crowd in the server space. And all the while, it doesn’t have to make the processors itself: unlike Intel, ARM only designs the architecture, leaving the rest up to a massive partner ecosystem featuring players such as Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia.

Here’s ARM chairman John Buchanan:

“Warren has transformed ARM during his time as CEO. In 2001 ARM had one processor product line found mainly in mobile phones. Now ARM provides the broadest portfolio of technologies in the industry, used by more than 300 semiconductor customers in nearly 9 billion chips last year.

“During Warren’s tenure the company has received royalties for over 40 billion ARM-based chips. As CEO he has created a strong platform for growth and consistently created value for shareholders even in a challenging external environment. On behalf of the Board, and the wider ARM team, deep thanks are due to Warren for his passion, service and leadership.”

So, will the leadership change affect ARM’s strategy? Right now ARM is safe in its mobile stronghold, although Intel’s efforts there are not the joke observers once suspected they might be – Intel’s mobile processors are surprisingly capable when it comes to raw performance and power efficiency, although ARM still edges ahead in the graphics department.

We can glean a sense of continuity from the words of East and Segars themselves. According to East, the two men “share a global perspective and belief in the ARM approach to partnership and collaboration.” Segars said East’s “vision of the ARM business model and commitment to the ARM partnership has been inspirational and has created a tremendous platform for future growth”.

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With its AaaS, United Kingdom-based Boston will use software from Ellexus to essentially provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to customers. Once enrolled, developers will be able to spin up or down multiple nodes on Boston’s Viridis microservers, which use the low-power Calxeda systems.

The impact of the Boston AaaS could trickle down the supply chain to Calxeda and AMD as well as other companies making or planning microservers and, naturally, ARM itself.

As I reported last month, the microserver market is expected to keep growing, and the new ARM cloud could bump up the growth rate. One might say it could help kick some AaaS.

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There’s another element to this new wave of technology, namely the software ecosystem that will emerge on top of that infrastructure. And a fundamental building block for that will be identity management — not for the users’ identities, but for the things themselves.

A company that’s thinking very hard about this element, Evrythng, has just joined a U.K. industry group that was set up last year by mobile chip architecture giant ARM, white space radio pioneer Neul, next-generation street light firm EnLight, sensor data outfit AquaMW and home energy management company AlertMe. The Internet of Things Architecture Forum (IoTA Forum, not to be confused with a similarly named European Union project) aims to shape the internet of things, and Evrythng’s contribution could make it easier for businesses to plug into that vision.

“We think a missing piece for the internet of things is how the identities of things get managed,” co-founder Andy Hobsbawm told me today. “A lot of the talk is about connectivity, but our view is that connectivity is being solved. The question is how you create applications that are valuable, and you can’t do that without making individual things addressable.”

Hobsbawm drew an analogy between Evrythng’s platform and Facebook, only a Facebook that’s for inanimate objects rather than people. The idea is to give each item its own discoverable profile that may contain digital content, warranty information, or even an associated virtual object.

The key to this approach is the smartphone, which the end user would use to interact with the tagged object — this could be through a technology such as NFC, rather than over the internet, so in a way it offers a bridge between the internet of things and things that aren’t necessarily always connected to the internet:

“Using everything’s system means that if the thing itself doesn’t have embedded connectivity, it’s simply a smart tag, performing many of the same functions. Your Facebook profile is a digital representation of you, an active living thing on the internet — somebody could be writing on your wall, or a Farmville app could be updating. So when you connect with [an object] using your smartphone, you draw down the updated dynamic state of that information.

“We would say it’s simply a case of defining connectivity as persistent or partial — it becomes connected when you provide connectivity with your smart mobile device.”

This could mean neat new applications for consumers, but Evrything also supplies managed analytics and APIs for businesses that want to track individual items and add data to them as they pass through the distribution chain. One example: the firm boasts a case study with the beverages giant Diageo, where people buying their dad a bottle of whisky for his birthday could add a “personalized film tribute”.

The company is also working with IBM and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and, according to Evrythng, the IoTA Forum is expanding to include device manufacturers and service providers. With links like that, it looks like this “Facebook for things” approach may just find traction.

This piece originally misspelled Evrythng’s name.

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ARM, which licenses its IP to a variety of chip makers, had stated its intentions to enter the data center market back in 2010, as worries about energy efficiency increased and the needs of webscale computing customers changed. While less powerful than their Intel counterparts, a cluster of lower-power ARM chips is more power efficient on a performance per watt basis and some workloads don’t even need the performance characteristics of a big Intel core.

The combination of these two trends has led to a plethora of vendors from big names like Marvell and AMD to startups such as Calxeda to license ARM’s cores with an eye toward making servers. Holding ARM back so far has been the delay in building out 64-bit capable cores (they are expected later this year) as well as a lack of enterprise software running on the ARM platform.

But given the economics of these so-called wimpy cores and the limits of using ARM cores in the enterprise server market today, the use of ARM-based servers in the storage arena is not surprising. Storage usage scenarios are perfect in many ways because they don’t need a lot of raw performance, nor do they require 64-bit capable cores.

Thus, Baidu using ARM for storage makes sense. It’s also an area where Calxeda expects to see its first production deployments sometime this year, according to a conversation I had with Karl Freund, the VP of marketing of Calxeda last December. As for the Baidu deployment, it’s using the quad-core Armada CPU, Marvell’s storage controller, and a 10Gb Ethernet switch all integrated on a single system on a chip.

Marvell’s release says the chip firm customized the ARM servers specifically for Baidu’s cloud storage requirements, taking the concept of server customization common in webscale deployments to the chip level. Marvell says the platform is designed to increase the amount of storage for conventional 2U chassis up to 96 TB, and to lower the total cost of ownership by 25 percent, compared with previous x86-based server solutions. The end result should cut Baidu’s power in its data center by half according to the release.

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The Tegra 4i could support delivery of 1080p video playback on a 5-inch screen, according to the reference design Nvidia showed off with the launch (see above). The Nvidia spokesman expects features like the HD playback to become mainstream by the time these chips hit the market at the end of 2013.

Nvidia, which entered the smartphone market in 2008 with its Tegra application processor that combined its graphics processors with an ARM-based core, has high hopes for the mobile market. But its first iterations were hampered by a lack of integrated modem on the chips like Qualcomm offered. An integrated modem lowers the number of parts inside the phone as well as the overall cost.

In 2011 Nvidia purchased Icera, which makes a software defined radio that will tune into a variety of frequencies. The Tegra 4i is its first chip that integrates the Icera chip on the same die as the Tegra application processor. Thus, the chip with support LTE as well as versions of HSPA in use by U.S. carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile.

The integration will deliver a smaller chip (made at the 28 nanometer process node) that will presumably consume less power. However, in a conference call ahead of the launch, Nvidia’s spokesman didn’t have specifics on the processor’s affect on battery life — a criticism that has dogged the Nvidia chips in the past.

From a spec side, the 4i will deliver up to 2.3 GHz and compares with Qualcomm’s chips using its Krait processor. The chip uses the ARM Cortex-A9 as opposed to the ARM A15 chip the Tegra 4 will use, and it has 60 CPU cores. While not designed for tablets, it’s conceivable that the smaller, cheaper tablets might well use the Tegra 4i design according to the Nvidia spokesman.

As we head into the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona we’re likely to see several chip and handset design announcements as well as a peek into the smartphones we’ll be using next year.

This story was corrected at 11 a.m. on Feb. 19 to reflect that Nvidia purchased Icera in 2011 not in 2009.

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Now, a higher-powered computer announced in November, the Odroid U2, is available and will set you back $89. Although Odroid is aimed at developers, anyone with a little technical know-how can use it for a full desktop experience.

The Odroid U2 is leaps and bounds more capable than the Raspberry Pi, which explains the higher cost. A quad-core 1.7 GHz Samsung chip powers the device, which is smaller than a credit card. A full 2 GB of memory, two USB ports, integrated Ethernet and a Mali-400 Quad Core 440MHz graphics chip are all on board. Essentially, Odroid U2 has the guts and computational capability of a high-end smartphone from about a year ago for $89.

What could you do with this mini-computer? On his Tao of Mac blog, Rui Carmo shares some of his recent experiences with the Odroid U2, which include installing a customized version of Android, adding Python for Android, a remote desktop client and later installing Linux. All of this runs on the 1920 x 1080 monitor Carmo attached to the Odroid U2. His thoughts?

“Most people would probably look at using this as a media centre (for which it is eminently suitable), to run arcade emulators (which I did, but mostly to be amazed at the speed of the thing), and, of course, for testing apps.

Me, I set up Evernote, Facebook Messenger and Flipboard on it (besides a number of Google Apps and a couple of terminal emulators), and soon had a couple of Android apps of my own running on it — one of them compiled locally using AIDE.”

Would I recommend running out and buying an Odroid as your next primary computer? Not at all. But for those who like to tinker, want to run Android or use a flavor of Linux for ARM on the desktop as a secondary, low-cost device, this is worth a look.

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