HP Project Moonshot servers due first half of 2012

HP will be shipping servers based on ARM chips and Intel's Atom processors in the first half of this year.

Confirmation of the launch timescale came today from Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and gemeral manager of enterprise storage, servers and networking [ESSN] at HP.

The servers were born out of the 'Project Moonshot' research programme developed by HP and announced at the start of last November.

The servers will be a significant boost to British chip designer ARM, which has traditionally been overlooked in favour of Intel and, to a lesser extent, AMD x86 processors.

This will lead to all kinds of incredible advancements and change the market

Donatelli took to the stage at HP's first global partner event in Las Vegas today, telling 3,000 HP partners his company was proud of the "game changing" announcements it had made in the server space in the past 100 days.

"Instead of building out of x86, we are going to build servers out of ARM chips and Atom chips, those same chips from your smartphones," he said.

"This will lead to all kinds of incredible advancements and change the market."

Donatelli then confirmed the new servers would be shipping in "the first half of the calendar year."

The servers themselves will be aimed at datacentres looking to run more effectively, especially large enterprises and cloud providers.

Project Moonshot aims to help companies with large sprawls consolidate their data centres and, in turn, make them more energy efficient.

HP has not turned its back on x86-based servers, however, and today launched its latest range, the ProLiant Gen8 family. To read more about the new servers, which also claim to make data centres greener with a 10 per cent reduction in energy consumption, click here.