Arm Chips Gaining in Data Centers, But Still in Single Digits

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Arm is ubiquitous in mobile and popular for laptops. Customization and price advantages mean it deserves a second look in the data center, as well.

www.datacenterknowledge.com, Aug. 29, 2022 – 

Arm technology may soon bring more energy efficiency to your data center servers. The firm's chips are gaining popularity with hyperscalers and, and the technology may soon spread more widely in the data center industry.

In the server market, Arm's market share is in the single digits, but climbing. According to Omdia, its market share rose to 7.1% in the second quarter of this year, up from less than 1 percent in 2019, 2.2% in 2020, and 5.4% at the end of 2021.

Arm -- which stands for Advanced RISC Machines -- differs from AMD and Intel in that it is more of a philosophy than a specific product. Arm architectures are used by chip manufacturers to create custom hardware for particular applications.

In the past, this was mostly for smartphones and other IoT devices. But several companies are also creating Arm-powered chips for the server market.

Arm has been actively promoting this, with the latest Arm Neoverse V1 and Arm Neoverse N2 chips designed to help their chip manufacturing partners go up against Intel's third-generation Xeon chips.

Cloud Providers Leverage Arm for Virtual Machines

And hyperscale cloud providers are using Arm to build their own custom chips.

Amazon has an Arm-based CPU, Graviton. Huawei has an Arm-based CPU called Kunpeng that it uses in its own cloud business.

In April, Microsoft announced a preview of Ampere Alta Arm-based processors as an option on its Azure Virtual Machines, claiming up to 50% better price performance.

Google followed suit in July, with an Arm-powered Tau T2A Compute Engine virtual machine, also powered by Ampere Alta.

Ampere's Arm-based chips are also used by Oracle and Equinix.

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