Will the next ten years still belong to Arm?

Latest update time：2020-12-31

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In 2000, I went to work for Lineo, an embedded Linux company, and although my desktop (remember?) ran x86, everything Lineo sold involved MIPS, RISC-based chips like Intel's i960, and... ARM. For decades, while ARM has remained highly relevant in mobile devices and elsewhere, there are certain areas where x86 seems insurmountable, which made us a little skeptical about ARM's future.

But lately, x86 is looking a lot more vulnerable.

Apple may try its best to make its new ARM-based M1 processor as powerful as it can, but few people will own an ARM-based Mac. In contrast, almost everyone will use an ARM-based mobile device or interact with web services powered by applications running on ARM-based compute instances on AWS or Microsoft Azure (announced) or Google Cloud (.

So, is it an ARM world now? The obvious answer is "yes".

ARM has always been

Whether you’re running an app on your phone or on the world’s fastest supercomputer, there’s a very good chance you’re running ARM. And given recent events, the trend toward “more” is likely to intensify. For years, ARM Limited has licensed its architecture to others to build chips, but it’s always had a lot of friends. However, with Nvidia’s $40 billion acquisition of ARM Limited, that’s ushered in some new twists.

Nvidia has spent years expanding the market for its GPUs (graphics processing units) into general-purpose applications that have found the right buyers in areas such as ML/AI, high-performance computing (HPC), etc. Now that it is acquiring ARM Limited, as PhoneGap co-founder Dave Johnson emphasized, "the products they launch in the near future will be vertically integrated ARM chip designs like the m1."

It's perfect timing, but according to Justin Erenkrantz, a member of the Apache Software Foundation, ARM has a lot going for it in the next decade.

Why so? Well, as the world becomes more mobile, chips designed from the ground up for great mobile performance are going to win. While x86 can still win on raw power, it’s not necessarily what buyers (especially for phones, laptops, etc.) want. ARM-based chips offer better battery life, simpler operation, and start to match x86 speeds (or exceed them, as AWS’s launch of Graviton2 EC2 instances suggests). They’re also cheaper to manufacture.

All of this is going to make life unpleasant for existing users of x86. Except... developers.

My computer, my cloud?

While there's clearly a need for ARM in the cloud, Linux creator Linus Torvalds recently dismissed the idea of ARM taking over as being lower/faster/cheaper. The key to ARM's dominance in the cloud (and elsewhere) may come down to its popularity on the machines that developers use to build their applications.

As Torvalds told Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in an email interview, "My point was not, as some people seem to have read it, 'ARM can't do it in the server space. My point was 'In order for ARM to be able to do it in the server space, I think they need to have development machines.'"

This makes sense, even though relatively few developers will be running Apple's M1 processor anytime soon, most apps no longer run on laptops, but on mobile devices (smartphones, tablets), and almost all of those apps already run on ARM. Even those apps that are optimized for laptops (and beyond) benefit from ARM's focus on customizability. For example, Apple can tweak ML-centric apps on ARM in ways that Intel's x86 simply can't. This turns out to be a trump card.

Nothing changes overnight. Will we see x86 deployment in the foreseeable future? Of course. But this "little mobile chip architecture" will play an increasingly important role in computing over the next decade.

Fast forward to 2030, and it’s likely that the entire computing landscape will look completely different.

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