AMD is planning to produce server processors based on ARM architecture targeted at the data center market, the company announced Monday.

The company will design 64-bit ARM processors, starting with a highly integrated multicore System-on-a-Chip (SoC) cards for high-density server deployments for scale-out compute infrastructures. The processor, which AMD said it would bring to market in 2014, will bear the same brand as its x86 server processors: Opteron.

The company will integrate ARM-based Opteron chips with the Freedom supercompute fabric, a technology for scale-out architectures it got its hands on through the US$334m acquisition of the microserver vendor SeaMicro in March.

ARM is a British company that licenses its processor architecture to processor makers. Because of their low energy use, ARM processors dominate the mobile-device market.

However, they have recently been picking up steam in the data center market, with multiple companies making ARM chips for data center servers and multiple companies, including major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), building servers around them. The architecture is attractive for the data center market for the same reason it is attractive for mobile devices: it does not result in power-hungry processors.

ARM processors are best suited for small and highly parallelized workloads, according to AMD.

Commenting on the announcement, Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight 64, said the computer industry had over the past 10 years “coalesced around two high-volume processor architectures – x86 for personal computers and servers, and ARM for mobile devices.

“Over the next decade, the purveyors of these established architectures will each seek to extend their presence into market segments dominated by the other. The path on which AMD has now embarked will allow it to offer products based on both x86 and ARM architectures, a capability no other semiconductor manufacturer can likely match.”