By Don Clark 

Intel Corp.'s dominant franchise in chips for the world's largest computers faces new attacks this week, but the Silicon Valley giant is responding with technology upgrades of its of its own.

The latest push to loosen Intel's hold on machines called supercomputers is being fueled by technology from ARM Holdings PLC, whose licensees supply the vast majority of chips used in smartphones and tablets. Applied Micro Circuits Corp., one of several companies developing ARM chips for server systems, announced plans Monday to market components for larger scientific machines, too.

Applied Micro also has a new ally in Nvidia Corp., whose chips render images for videogames and are also used to accelerate computing work done on general-purpose processors. Nvidia is announcing that its products, which are already used as accelerators along with Intel-based supercomputers, are now being used alongside Applied Micro chips in new supercomputers from at least three vendors.

The announcements are pegged to a conference in Germany for vendors and users of supercomputers, the room-sized machines that have long been used for jobs like oil exploration, weather forecasting and cracking codes. The unveilings are a sign that companies bringing ARM technology to corporate data centers don't plan to limit themselves to low-end applications where conserving energy is the paramount consideration.

"Quite frankly, people have been putting ARM in a box of low performance, while here you have Applied Micro and Nvidia coming together for a high-performance product," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Intel, though, is also raising the bar on performance. The company has been selling an accelerator chip of its own to compete with offerings from Nvidia and others, based on the x86 technology used in both personal computers and servers. That chip, called Xeon Phi, was designed to be used in supercomputers along with Intel's standard Xeon server chips.

The company, at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, is providing new details of a forthcoming version of the Xeon Phi that can also work on its own to power an entire supercomputer. The next version, which has been code-named Knight's Landing, features more than 60 small calculating engines based on a design called Silvermont. It is expected to be three times faster than the prior version on many kinds of computing chores.

The next Xeon Phi also comes with new high-speed circuitry for connecting chips together in a system. Most supercomputers use connections based on either Ethernet or InfiniBand, two standard technologies that are available from multiple vendors.

Intel's development of a custom-designed connection technology is a new tack. But Charles Wuischpard, its vice president and general manager for workstations and high-performance computing, said its technical specifications will be shared so other companies can adopt it if they choose.

The new Xeon Phi has already been picked by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy. It plans to install a Cray Inc. system in Berkeley, Calif., that has more than 9,300 of the new Knight's Landing processors.

Intel's current Xeon Phi is used in a system in China called Tianhe-2 that has once again topped a twice-yearly ranking of the 500 most powerful systems in the world, which is being announced at the Leipzig event. In all, Intel chips account for 85% of systems on the list issued Monday.

But Paramesh Gopi, Applied Micro's chief executive, argues that the arrival of the first supercomputers that use its ARM-based chips is an important step in breaking Intel's hegemony in the market--and a sign the technology is powerful enough to be used in all kinds of servers.

"You've never seen ARM in a supercomputing context before," he said. "This is a huge, groundbreaking step."

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

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