IC Insights: New microserver segment lifts server market
High-density systems emerge as a growth driver and battleground between Intel and AMD processors
Responding to requests for services and files from a growing range of end-user systems that demand quick access to data, video, audio, web pages, and search engines, computer servers have been the workhorses of the Internet and data networks for two decades,
Price erosion and the weak global economy have lowered server sales volumes in the past two years, but this computer market is expected to see a modest rebound in 2014 with worldwide revenues rising about 3 percent to $54.6 billion, followed by stronger growth in 2015 and 2016, according to IC Insights' new 2014 edition of 'IC Market Drivers - A Study of Emerging and Major End-Use Applications Fueling Demand for Integrated Circuits'.
Servers, which accounted for an estimated 13 percent of total computer systems revenues in 2013, are forecast to reach record-high sales in the next three years before the next economic slowdown pulls the market down again in 2017 as shown in the figure at the top of this story. Server sales are forecast to rise by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just 1.5 percent between 2012 and 2017.
Server unit shipment growth will be stronger in the next several years, driven by purchases of new less-expensive microservers, says the 2014 IC Market Drivers report.
High-density microservers contain many central processing units (CPUs) on microprocessors and emphasise power efficiency for massive amounts of lightweight-computing tasks, such as delivering thousands of web pages to users of smartphones and other mobile systems.
New microserver systems are also being aimed at a wider range of data centre applications and new cloud-computing services. This computer segment has become a major battleground between Intel and about a half-dozen processor suppliers developing new 64-bit MPUs with ARM CPU cores for server systems.
IC Insights forecasts that microserver sales will climb 139 percent in 2014 to $580 million from an estimated $243 million in 2013. Between 2012 and 2017, microserver sales are projected to rise by a CAGR of nearly 72 percent, totalling $1.2 billion in the final year of the forecast in the Servers and Cloud Computing section of the new report.
The total server IC market is projected to increase 3 percent in 2014 to $14.4 billion after back-to-back annual sales declines of 2 percent in 2013 and 2012.
Overall, the server IC market is expected to rise by a CAGR of just 1.0 percent in the 2012-2017 period to $15.0 billion in the final year of the forecast, but stronger revenue growth will occur in multi-core MPUs for microservers and NAND flash memories for solid-state drives (SSDs), which can significantly boost the performance of servers by enabling more input/output operations per second (IOPS) than standard hard-disk drives, says the new 2014 report.
