Norrod said that Dell has a good sense of what the ARM ecosystem will look like for the next 12 to 18 months. Depending on customer demand and viability, the company will have a strategy in place to release ARM-based servers.

ARM, which licenses CPU designs to chip makers, started talking about server processors in 2008. Marvell in November announced an ARM-based quad-core chip for servers, marking the chip designer's entry into the server market. Calxeda and Nvidia are also developing chips based on ARM cores.

ARM doesn't have the history in the server market, and most of the software tuning takes place for the x86 architecture, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

Some companies are also reluctant to experiment with new architectures such as ARM especially when running critical applications, McCarron said. Intel's Xeon has RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) features to solve data errors on the fly and ensure high server uptime.

"Being a new guy precludes [ARM] from getting activity in that market," McCarron said.