Samsung Electronics has decided to drop the server chip effort and discontinue work being carried out by a team in Milpitas, Calif., the Wall Street Journal reports. Samsung, which is making mobile phone chips based on ARM technology , had hired a number of server-chip specialists from AMD and other companies in order to develop chips for servers.

Samsung had established a chip unit in San Jose, where the company was building a new research and development center.

"Samsung Semiconductor has refocused some of its R&D efforts," a spokeswoman for the company said.

Another company leaving the server-chip push to others, at least for the moment, is Nvidia. The company used the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show to announce an effort to develop a more powerful offering in an effort called Project Denver. A company blog post at the time said the future product would extend "the range of ARM systems upward to PCs, data center servers, and supercomputers."

Project Denver will still be a high-performance chip, but will initially be part of the Tegra line focusing on mobile devices.

Qualcomm has been also working on server chips but has not announced any plans to introduce them.