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Karl Freund, the VP of marketing for Calxeda, says the company has shipped about 3,000 nodes and 130 systems although none are deployed in production environments yet. He expects the first production deployments to occur at the end of the second quarter of 2013. But most of the conversation was about how ARM-based systems could be used today in the storage market. Not just for cold storage such as Amazon’s Glacier or Facebook’s photo storage effort, but even for the big storage systems for scale out storage and enterprise class storage appliances. Named customers who are evaluating the systems include Scale.io, Gluster and Inktank, the storage startup backed by Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame that is commercializing Ceph.

There are more, notes Freund, (pictured) who says that when Calxeda servers make it into production environments, they will likely be deployed first in a storage capacity, as storage customers don’t care if the chips are 64-bit compatible. For now, ARM-based systems are stuck only able to address less memory because ARM only has a 32-bit capable core design. Next year ARM will have a 64-bit capable design and systems will be built around them in 2014 (maybe even late 2013). Calxeda plans its 64-bit capable SoC for 2014.

But Calxeda isn’t waiting and in storage, it’s also not focusing on power consumption — the initial draw for ARM-based servers in the scale out data center. For the storage world, where spinning hard drives tends to suck huge quantities of electricity, adding a low-power has a negligable affect on the consumption of an overall system. However, Calxeda boasts that popping in more of its systems on a chip (SoC) are both cheaper and make for faster information transfer and retrieval.

Its tests show roughly a 4X improvement in IOPs for a rack of Calxeda SoCs versus x86-based systems. Adding Calexeda’s SoCs also cuts complexity because the entire system of processing and networking components are integrated on the SoC, and the terabit-plus fabric between cores also offers more network capacity between cores in a system –the so-called east-west networking traffic.

As the market for scale out computing, storage and networking changes the demands made on IT equipment, Calxeda and others are seeing an opportunity that may have begun in servers and the cloud computing environment, but certainly isn’t stopping there. No wonder Intel is trying to catch up with chips of its own. So far, it’s recently announced new Atom-based chips haven’t made the cut for most customers I’ve spoken with (the lack of integration of the entworking and processing hardware is a problem), but in 2014 it will have a new, integrated SoC as well. Then, the competition will really get interesting.

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Appleton was alone, flying a small Lanceair experimental aircraft, according to the Boise Weekly. The plane reportedly crashed around 9 a.m. between two runways.

In its statement, Micron said:

Our hearts go out to his wife, Dalynn, his children and his family during this tragic time. Steve’s passion and energy left an indelible mark on Micron, the Idaho community and the technology industry at large.

Trading on Micron shares was halted on the news.  In 1984 2004, Appleton was injured in another plane crash when his stunt plane crashed in the desert near Boise, according to this EETimes report.

Appleton joined the Boise-based semiconductor company in 1983 and was named president and COO in 1991. Three years later, he was appointed CEO and chairman, according to his company biography.

In addition to his Micron duties, Appleton served on the board of the Semiconductor Industry Association and of National Semiconductor. He was also a member of the World Semiconductor Council.

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Spending on the two types of semiconductors was essentially a tie in 2010, when wireless chips totaled $51.2 billion and spending on PC chips was $51.8 billion, according to IHS iSuppli’s calculations. But the growth in 2011 was all wireless, as you can see in the chart below.

The rise of mobile devices, which sold in record numbers last year, is responsible. “Wireless will continue to generate the most growth during the next two years,” said IHS iSuppli semiconductor analyst Wenlie Ye. “A substantial portion of the segment’s increase will be due to rising tablet sales, although mobile handsets like smartphones will continue to account for the lion’s share of semiconductor segment in the wireless area.”

And who’s spending the most on semiconductors for tablets? You won’t be too surprised to find out it’s Apple, the world’s biggest seller of touchscreen tablets. Last year, Apple spent $4.6 billion on chips for tablets, more than any other OEM. The next closest — though “close” is a relative term here — was Apple frenemy-in-chief, Samsung, which spent $603.2 million on tablet chips. HTC was in third with $199.2 million.

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Apple spent $17.3 billion on semiconductors in 2011, driven mostly by the popularity of the iPhone, iPad and solid-state drives that ship by default with its MacBook Air. Apple’s spending increased 35 percent from 2010, when it spent $12.8 billion on semiconductors. HP, which had spent $17.6 billion in 2010, saw its PC shipments decline 16.2 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2011. That, combined with a lackluster year overall for PCs, drove HP’s spending down to $16.6 billion in 2011.

It is no coincidence that Apple’s biggest competition on the mobile device front was also its closest rival when it came to semiconductor spending. Samsung spent $16.7 billion in 2011, a 9 percent increase over its spending in 2011.

Apple’s massive spending on semiconductors is a result of huge sales of its products, but that kind of spending power will also help it continue to secure and maintain its supply-chain advantage. Expect to see the gulf between Apple and HP in terms of this measure of success widen further, as mobile devices increasingly overtake PCs as the central device in users’ daily lives and as Apple continues to shift its focus to notebooks and computers that rely more on solid-state storage.

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Reuters says Samsung is building the A5 in a new, $3.6 billion non-memory chip production facility that makes up part of Samsung’s sprawling factory in the plant, which is as big as about nine football fields, or 1.6 million square feet. Samsung’s A5 production in the Austin facility achieved full production in December, and almost all of its capacity is dedicated to making chips for Apple, according to Reuters’ sources.

Apple declined to comment to Reuters, since it doesn’t publicly discuss its supplier relationships, and a Samsung rep likewise wouldn’t name names, though they did confirm to Reuters that the plant was indeed recently expanded to make logic chips, in addition to NAND flash memory modules. Samsung has only one other factory for producing chips like the A5, located in its home country of South Korea.

In the U.S., Austin is a destination for semiconductor companies. It hosts facilities from corporations like ARM, Intel and Freescale Semiconductor, and has a steady stream of field-specific engineering graduates from the University of Texas for these companies to draw staff from.

Apple’s devices are still assembled in China out of components mostly sourced from Asian suppliers, but it’s sort of nice to know that a good portion of the processors that make the things work are made on U.S. soil.

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The original Cray supercomputer

In the past decade supercomputers were dressed-up versions of Intel’s x86 machines, but increasingly supercomputers are borrowing innovations (and silicon in the form of ARM-based chips or DSPs) from the mobile and big data realms to add speed without guzzling too much power.

Prior to this century many supercomputers really were a different animal entirely, sporting specialty chips and software. But the industry turned to commodity chips in the early 2000s. Now, to meet the demands of exascale computing at low power, chip makers are taking inspiration from the cloud computing and mobile industries.

ARM tries supercomputing on for size

As the Supercomputing 2011 show gets under way in Seattle, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, ARM and others are announcing new silicon to power the machines we rely on for science, climate prediction and high-end simulations in industries that range from oil production to car design.

Nvidia is a fairly recent newcomer to the supercomputing market, but it has made huge strides since 2008, when it first starting pushing its graphics processors (GPUs) as a way to boost speed while keeping energy usage in check. It said it would use its high-end GPUs and its new GPU-plus-ARM chip to build a new supercomputer in Spain. This is the first time an ARM-based processor has made its way into a supercomputer. ARM thus far has been the chip of choice inside cell phones and tablets.

Accelerator chips advance in supercomputers

Japan's K supercomputer is the fastest in the world.

Nvidia is doing well with its GPUs, given that in the top 500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers, 39 systems use GPUs as accelerators and 35 of these use Nvidia chips. The graphics processors are used in supercomputers because they can handle massively parallel tasks that high-end computing requires while using less energy than the typical CPUs made by Intel and AMD. Nvidia and its GPUs made their first appearance on the list in 2008, and the last time the top 500 list was published, six months ago, Nvidia chips were in 17 machines. To go to 35 today is a pretty big uptake.

Perhaps inspired by Nvidia’s success in getting its GPUs onto supercomputers, Texas Instruments is bringing its digital signal processors to the mix for high-performance computing. DSP chips are really good at math, and they are used in telecommunications chips and in routers. TI has been thinking about this for a while, but Monday was its first launch into the market formally.

New chips for the cloud

The same power-efficiency issues that plague those trying to advance supercomputing are hitting those who run webscale applications, from Facebook to Amazon Web Services. And while the cloud and web-scale data center operators aren’t looking for specialty gear, like Infiniband for networking, they are running one or a few applications on their hardware, similar in some ways to a supercomputer, where all workloads are optimized for speed.

This is why certain chip and hardware companies, such as Tilera, Calxeda and Applied Micro, see an opportunity to redesign the silicon and gear inside the cloud. Meanwhile, companies such as Adapteva, which makes a massively multicore chip for cell phones and HPC, see an opportunity in pushing into supercomputers and mobile handsets, where the need for more-powerful processors and lower power consumption are always at war. And with ARM piggybacking on this trend thanks to Nvidia, it’s clear that supercomputers want to be super without the influence of PCs.

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The Quantance chip

Surprisingly there are still semiconductor companies getting funding out there, as Quantance, a chip maker proved Monday when it scored $11 million in third-round funding from TD Fund, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and DOCOMO Capital. This follows on a second round the company raised in 2008.

Quantance, which was formed in 2006, makes an analog radio chip that helps boost the signal the cell phone delivers to the base station – hardly the sexiest component on a board, but its breakthrough is enabling the battery in cell phones to last longer. There’s a lot math and architecture going into the chip, which will be in actual handsets, tablets and other mobile devices that contain a modem, some time in the first half of next year.

And now, with this round of funding CEO Vikas Vinayak is eyeing the computation market, where power usage, especially on laptops and mobile CPUs is still high. Quantance can adapt its component to allow CPUs to idle at lower power than they do today. So now that it has managed to get a working chip in actual products in one market, it’s ready to target the next opportunity. Luckily for Quantance, between our demand for mobility and our demand for more computing, reducing power consumption will always be a big deal.

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VIA manufactures a low-power x86 processor (Apple’s processors are a licensed, ARM-based design), and says the patents in questions “generally concern microprocessors included in a variety of electronic products such as certain smartphones, tablet computers, portable media players and other computing devices.” That seems to cast a fairly wide net, but since the core tech behind products made by VIA and Apple are based on completely different architecture, it could be that its issues are mainly to do with the modifications Apple has made to the basic ARM design in order to makes its A-series processors more power efficient.

VIA Technologies has a strong patent portfolio, part of which it recently offloaded to smartphone manufacturer HTC through the sale of S3 Graphics. S3 won a mixed, but generally favorable decision at the ITC against Apple in July. A final decision resulting from that initial ruling is scheduled for November, and could theoretically result in a ban on sales of some Apple products in the U.S.

An A-series chip is likely to power Apple’s iPhone 5, which according to most reports will arrive sometime next month.

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