Russian startup working on Intel to ARM software emulator

10.10.2012
A Russian startup company called Elbrus Technologies is developing a technology that will allow data center owners to migrate software designed for x86 platforms to ARM-powered servers without the need to recompile it.

Because of their very low power consumption, ARM processors are used today in most smartphones, tablets and in a wide variety of embedded devices.

However, ARM chips are also expected to gain a foothold in the server market, which is currently dominated by x86 processors, during the next few years. Hewlett-Packard and Dell have already announced plans to build low-power servers based on ARM CPUs.

Intel CPUs use up to ten times more power than ARM CPUs and for large data centers power consumption represents 50 percent of their operational costs, said Anatoly Konukhov, the chief business development officer of Elbrus Technologies in Moscow.

In this context it makes sense for many data center operators to consider switching to ARM-based servers in the future. However, a big impediment is that many applications -- specially proprietary, closed-source, ones -- that are designed for the x86 CPUs won't work on ARM processors.

Elbrus Technologies is trying to solve this issue by building an x86 to ARM binary translator application that will allow proprietary software compiled for the x86 architecture to run on ARM-powered servers without any changes.