Low-cost and low-power mobile processors are making their way into data centers as organizations adopt hyperscale architectures to keep up with the rapid growth in unstructured information. Hardware maker Dell is pushing into this space as part of an effort to stay competitive in the increasingly commoditized server market.

The company is demonstrating its first 64-bit ARM microserver at this week’s TechCon conference in Santa Clara, California. The machine runs the Fedora version of Linux on an ARM processor from AppliedMicro with a 16-port SAS storage storage system provided by PMC-Sierra. Dell plans to deliver a proof of concept model with the AppliedMicro chip sometime in early 2014.

“This is a key milestone for customers seeking to run real world workloads on 64-bit ARM technology,” Dell executive Robert Hormuth wrote in a Monday blog post. “We believe the 64-bit ARM-based processor demonstrates promise for storage and Web front-end environments, where advantages in dollars per gigabyte, watts per gigabyte, performance per dollar, and performance per watt are critical.”

Launched this month, ARM’s 64-bit architecture does away with the 4GB memory limitation of the previous 32-bit designs to accelerate application response times, streamline rendering, and lower development costs. These benefits have not gone unnoticed by Altera, which recently announced that its Stratix 10 system-on-a-chip (SoC) will pack a 64-bit Cortex-A53 ARM processor.

Intel, Altera’s primary manufacturing partner, will produce the chip using its 14nm 3D Tri-Gate transistor technology. The CPU is designed for use in high-end networking and communication equipment, among other specialized applications, which means that it won’t pit Altera against Qualcomm, Samsung or Nvidia.

Set to hit production lines in 2014, the A53 is set to become the world’s first commercially available quad-core ARM CPU.