Many rumblings have been heard over the past year about ARM chips showing up in servers. ZT Systems has just announced one. It's a 1U rack-mounted server which includes 8 dual-core ARM chips, each of which is essentially a distinct node in a cluster. ZT calls each node a "system on module" or SOM. Each SOM gets 1GB of DDR3 ECC DRAM and 1GB of NAND flash. The processors are A9-cortex dual-core, made by STMicro. These processors are pretty slow, maxing out at 600MHz and the memory is very lean at 500MB per core so it won't be just any server side code that runs well on one of these. On the other hand, they draw very little power, apparently no more than 80W per 1U server node. So these are servers for special-purpose, very parallel apps running in very power-sensitive environments.
From a compute space density perspective, this is uninteresting as a 2-socket 1U Westmere box would be much, much faster and can carry much more DRAM (18 DIMMs in the latest System x offering). Naturally, such a box draws much more power as well but it is an open question still whether the power-performance equation tilts in favour of the ARM-based box. Can't wait to see a side-by-side comparison.
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