Arm Holdings expects its architecture will account for half of the data center CPU market share by the end of this year, and to help achieve those goals it has launched a batch of new migration tools for application porting.
Mohamed Awad, senior vice president and general manager of the Infrastructure Business at Arm made the claim in a blog posting, citing Arm’s lower power consumption than x86 processors. As a result, Arm-based products have become increasingly popular even with the big cloud computing companies, which are concerned about the power drain of their massive bit barns, Awad said.
There has been considerable activity around Arm in recent years. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google have all design their own custom silicon for their respective cloud services. Nvidia has entered the CPU business with its own Arm processor, codenamed Grace. Qualcomm is reportedly looking to enter the market after several aborted attempts.
Japanese giant Softbank acquired Arm and attempted to sell it to Nvidia in 2021 but the deal collapsed facing considerable opposition. And just last month Softbank acquired Ampere, the maker of Arm-based server chips primarily used by Oracle.
That’s just on the processing side. Arm cores are also used in a number of smartNICs for intelligent network routing.
So to that end, Arm has introduced a series of new developer tools and services designed to support rapid migration of x86 apps to the Arm architecture.
“Our goal is to ensure developers have comprehensive support and access to in-depth resources for a seamless migration to Arm, enabling them to fully maximize the benefits of Arm in the cloud,” wrote Bhumik Patel, director of server ecosystem development at Arm in his own blog post.
Through its Learning Paths tutorials along with workload-specific technical walk-throughs, developers can receive assistance across the various stages of a migration project and can directly engage with Arm cloud migration experts for project support.
The Cloud Migration Resource Hub provides resources on migrating the most common workloads with over 100+ step-by-step Learning Paths for migrating major workloads across multiple cloud platforms. In addition, the Software Ecosystem Dashboard for Arm provides up-to-date information on compatible Arm versions of major open source and commercial software components.
In the cloud, developers moving AI workloads can use Arm Kleidi integrations in the latest generation of leading frameworks like open-source machine learning framework, PyTorch and benefit from dramatic AI performance improvements on Arm without taking any extra steps., experts say.
“These updates will have an immediate impact in assisting cloud developers in making their move to Arm, but it’s not the only investment we’re making to ensure Arm is the most developer-friendly platform,” Patel wrote.