Low-power chips based on Arm are used in most smartphones today, and are slowly reaching servers as alternatives to power-hungry x86 server processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Companies like Marvell and Smooth-stone have announced plans to build Arm CPUs into servers for cloud-computing environments.

Apple is essentially taking A4 in a similar direction that Intel is taking the low-power Atom processors, which are already being used in low-power servers, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

At a lower price than x86 chips, the A4 chip could be an attractive alternative to Atom.

"Arm's already being used in that class of products," McCarron said.

Media servers do not require much processing power and act more as network servers to store and serve multimedia, McCarron said. At the same time, the media server segment is already well-covered between the Apple TV device and the Mac Mini.