Arm Aims to Be at the Center of Increasingly Diverse Datacenter

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hcpwire.com, Nov. 05, 2022 – 

Arm's been riding high on the mobile market for decades now, but has struggled to make its mark on servers. But the company hopes to reverse that with some new initiatives that Arm executives addressed at the recent Arm DevSummit held last week.

The top initiative revolves around providing programming and design tools so its chip designs can provide the fastest answers to solve complex problems without worrying about the hardware on which it is executed.

Arm is taking a long-term view that accelerators that include GPUs and neural processors will play a big role in computing, with CPUs based on Armv9 architecture facilitating the distribution of workloads in computers.

"In the modern world with increasingly diverse compute requirements, we believe specialized processing is the new standard bearer that will enable us to move beyond the faster, better, cheaper track of general-purpose computing," said Gary Campbell, executive vice president of central engineering at Arm, during a keynote that was streamed.

Arm historically has been focused on its CPU technology, and 230 billion chips have shipped over the last 31 years in smartphones, embedded devices, and to a lesser extent, PCs and servers. But Arm is now breaking through in the mainstream enterprise computing environments.

Developers want to write their application code and compile it so that it will work without explicitly having to specify a chip at which to redirect a workload, said Mark Hambleton, vice president of open-source software.

In a keynote at Arm DevSummit, Hambleton said: "we observed from the server space that a tight adherence to standards meant operating systems would land on any server, from old to new, and just work, year-in, year-out. Arm servers already work this way."

That will result in savings in cost and time, "faster innovation, better portability, and perhaps most importantly, everything just works," Hambleton said in his keynote.

The concept of diverse computing environments with a multitude of chips is not new. Arm licensees, most notably Nvidia and Intel, have parallel programming software tools that automatically distribute computing to relevant chips.

But having all major known chipmakers as clients puts Arm in a bind as it cannot release its own specialized software framework or show bias toward a specific client.

Like with Linux, Arm's software efforts revolve around upstreaming code in the Linux kernel and working with open-source consortiums like CNCF, Linaro and Linux Foundation. Hardware customers can take Arm's tools and tweak them to their needs. For example, Nvidia has placed its CPU roadmap squarely on Arm architecture and it is modifying its CUDA parallel programming framework to fit its long-term Arm plans.

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