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Arm TechDays 2019

For Cloud and Infrastructure: This is Arms Neoverse Universe

20. Februar 2019, 15:00 Uhr | Frank Riemenschneider

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Fortsetzung des Artikels von Teil 5

Conclusion

At its TechCon developer conference in October 2018, Arm announced the Neoverse brand and now surprisingly quickly delivered the first 7 nm silicon. After the success of Arm and its licensees was and remained manageable, especially in the area of data centers, the Cambridge team apparently realized that the Cortex A processors, which were ultimately developed for smartphones, were only suitable for infrastructure applications to a limited extent, even though they also found their place in embedded applications in the second step. In particular, the memory subsystem of the Cortex CPUs is of course not designed for these data throughputs.

With the Neoverse N1/E1 CPUs, the microarchitectures of Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55 have been further developed to meet the needs of the infrastructure markets. The thickest pound that can peddle against top dog Intel, whose Xeon chips have a market share of 95% + x in data centers, is the outstanding energy efficiency. In applications with a limited energy budget, this allows unrivalled computing power to be provided or, in the case of data centers, the same computing power with lower energy costs (including cooling) in order to save operators costs.

The success or failure of Neoverse will certainly not depend on the IP or silicon of Arms licensees, but on the ecosystem. The question will be how many partners Arm can pull on his side to really attack the established X86 universe around Intel. The fact that Arm has experience in building and maintaining an ecosystem has been proven sufficiently in the consumer sector. Mobile devices are now said to be 100 % poor, Intel and others sooner or later had to surrender. And even Apple hangs on an arm architecture license and builds its SoCs on the basis of the Armv8-A architecture.

Arm took a first step in the right direction by winning Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS instances (EC2 A1) are now offered on the basis of arm CPUs developed in-house, which bear the name "Graviton". According to AWS, these are 45% cheaper than comparable x86-based solutions. The availability of VMware ESXi for Arm should also open the way for micro and nano data centers in particular. Time will have to show the rest. Unlike Intel, which is listed on the stock exchange, however, Arm's owner Softbank and its 300-year visionary and CEO Masayoshi Son will not throw in the towel so quickly if market share growth remains clear in the first few years.

Intel will have to deal with a serious competitor for the first time in its history in its core market, which generates the highest sales/chips and the highest returns.