ARMing openSUSE and ATOMing SUSE For Low-Energy Server Architectures

The new openSUSE 12.3 release, besides having many other great features, introduced ARM for the first time as a new, fully supported architecture.

There has already been support for ARM in 12.2, but the 32-bit architecture is reaching its limits. Therefore, the exciting story about this is, that even a 64-bit version with ARM support is available as experimental images. With the availability of ARM processor support, openSUSE enters the market of extreme low energy (ELE) processors.

The success of ARM processors in the low-energy appliances segment opens the door not only to Cloud, Big Data and High Performance Computing, but also laptops and equivalent devices using ELE processors. So, it is just a logical step to include support of this processor architecture in an operating system for large scale servers.

HP has already announced the Moonshot server, with which the energy consumption supposedly decreases down to a bit over 10% of what it used to be before in other servers. An almost 90% energy savings sounds like a motivating driver for cost reduction efforts. The Moonshot 1500, for instance, uses Intel’s Atom S1200 processor, where the top model – the Atom S1289 – clocks at 2 GHz and consumes just 14 Watts.

Listen to what SUSE’s Vice President Global Alliances and Marketing is saying about HP Moonshot and SUSE. And there’s an additional video about the HP moonshot introduction.

Calxeda, in turn, has reaffirmed its commitment to HP’s Moonshot project and thus the image for Calxeda’s SoC (Server on Chip) is the technical highlight of this release.

With all these great news around the ARM and Intel Processors, SUSE’s ELE strategy is taking its partnership with Intel to a next level.