Arm's next battlefield revealed

After experiencing a period of lows, Arm servers are once again experiencing an opportunity for rapid development as the data center market increasingly shows diversified demands.

After launching Arm Neoverse, a brand for infrastructure fields such as cloud data centers, edge computing and 5G network markets in 2018, Arm began to continue its efforts in the data center field, and successively launched the Neoverse N1 platform Neoverse V1 platform and Neoverse N2 in 2019 and last year.

Recently, at a media communication meeting held by Arm, Zou Ting, global senior director of Arm Infrastructure Business Unit, introduced the progress of the Arm Neoverse platform and shared his views on topics such as DPU, ecosystem construction and the Chinese market.

Three platforms respond to diversified innovation in the cloud market

Currently, the Arm Neoverse platform product roadmap currently has three series of platforms:

V Series Platform: A new computing series that prioritizes performance, currently represented by the Neoverse V1 platform, targeting performance-first applications such as high-performance computing and machine learning.

N series platform: Focusing on PPA, the series pursues a balanced design of PPA. Currently, the series includes Neoverse N1 and N2 platforms. Suitable for general server CPU chips, horizontal expansion cloud, enterprise networks, smart network cards, customized ASIC accelerator infrastructure, etc. 5G base stations and other network equipment, etc.

E series platform: The main focus is on throughput efficiency, and it is optimized in terms of power consumption and area reduction. It is very effective for network traffic and data applications. Currently, it is represented by the Neoverse E1 platform, which has obvious advantages in supporting applications such as network data layer processors, low-power gateways, and 5G deployments.

According to Zou Ting, each platform series is designed and developed for different applications, which means that the development focus of each series of products is also different. The infrastructure market is changing very rapidly and is constantly developing, so in order to meet the diversity and rapid changes in this market, different types of computing solutions will inevitably appear in the market, such as CPU solutions for cloud computing. As a leading global IP supplier, Arm is pleased to see the diverse innovative technologies launched to meet cloud needs, which is also one of the original intentions of Arm to launch the Neoverse platform.

Why Arm servers are popular

Today, the market share of Arm servers is in a period of rapid growth. Data released by IDC shows that in the third quarter of 2020, Arm-based servers grew by 431% year-on-year, and in the fourth quarter of 2020, they grew by 345% year-on-year. According to Statista, the market share of Arm architecture processors in data centers and clouds will increase from 5% in 2019 to 25% by 2028. The market size in 2028 will reach US$58 billion, more than 14 times that of 2019.

In Zou Ting's opinion, there are several main reasons why Arm is popular.

First, future infrastructure will present more diversified requirements, and traditional general solutions will be difficult to apply; second, in the face of more and more diverse workloads, Moore's Law is slowing down and requirements for data center floor space and power density are being met; third, the innovation being driven by cloud service providers and super-large Internet companies has reached an unprecedented level.

"These are driving the optimization of the entire data center. Now these optimizations are gradually migrating from upper-level applications to the entire machine and extending to server processors. Through Neoverse, Arm and a broad ecosystem of partners are providing a unique platform to implement future solutions for server chips. Among them, the strong development momentum brought by AWS Graviton2 is a very powerful proof of this common vision." said Zou Ting.

Graviton2 is a self-developed Arm server chip launched by AWS in 2019. Earlier this year, AWS Graviton2 was first launched in China. Graviton2 is based on the 64-bit Arm Neoverse N1 microarchitecture design and is ARM's first CPU architecture for data centers. The cost-effectiveness can be improved by 40% compared to the x86 solution, and the computing capacity can be increased by 4 times.

On the one hand, super-large Internet customers use Arm IP to customize server chips to meet the needs of their special application scenarios. On the other hand, there are also a large number of enterprise customers who are very interested in the high cost-effectiveness and excellent TCO performance brought by standardized Arm server chips, which also brings a very broad market prospect to independent Arm server chip manufacturers.

ASIC is the best choice for DPU

Previously, Marvell has taken the lead in launching the OCTEON 10 series DPU using Arm Neoverse N2. Intel's latest series of IPUs also rarely use the Arm Neoverse N1 core. In the past 6 to 12 months, a large number of DPU startups have emerged in the domestic market. How does Arm view the current hot DPU track?

Zou Ting said that DPU is a very hot field and topic in China. First of all, I am very happy to see that Marvell has adopted Arm Neoverse N2 in the OCTEON 10 platform. Through the very powerful functions of Neoverse, Marvell has been assisted in providing the next generation of network solutions. Compared with previous generations of OCTEON, OCTEON 10 can provide 3 times the performance improvement and 50% power consumption optimization.

In addition, other partners including NVIDIA announced the use of Arm technology in the BlueField-3 DPU, and at Intel's Architecture Day, Mount Evans also adopted 16 Arm Neoverse N1 cores.

Zou Ting said that from the perspective of DPU implementation, the DPU is connected to the host system and receives power through the PCI-Express slot, which limits the energy consumption available to the DPU. For this reason, coupled with the DPU's support for dedicated workload accelerators and packet processing functions, it is crucial that the processor in the DPU can provide excellent performance per watt. The Neoverse N series can provide industry-leading performance per watt, making it the best choice as the DPU core.

"Everyone is looking for how to implement their own ideas, and I believe that the Arm Neoverse N series can bring advantages to DPU manufacturers in terms of performance and performance per watt. Not only domestic Internet giants, but also the world's leading Internet companies, are beginning to gradually deploy and adapt standardized DPU products. At the same time, most of them are also exploring self-research or outsourcing the development of customized DPU products that suit the special needs of their own businesses." said Zou Ting.

Zou Ting pointed out that ASIC SoC DPU is the general final target product form, although we also see the solution of using FPGA as a transition. In terms of energy consumption and performance requirements, the Arm Neoverse platform, especially the N series platform, is the best choice for ASIC SoC solutions in DPU.

Building an ecosystem around four sub-sectors

In the field of infrastructure applications, the core performance of the processor is crucial. This is also the original intention of Arm to launch and invest huge R&D resources to develop the Neoverse platform in the past few years to meet the high performance standards of infrastructure applications, especially in the server CPU field.

Driving the success of a market requires collaboration across an entire ecosystem, including semiconductor partners, ISVs, ODMs, open source communities, OEM customers, IP partners, and more.

According to Zou Ting, the above are all the ideas of Arm in developing the Neoverse platform, which includes all the ecosystem elements of the next-generation infrastructure solutions. Through years of joint efforts between Arm and its partners, Arm Neoverse has now achieved a high level of maturity in data centers and cloud native ecosystems.

Zou Ting pointed out that the co-construction, sharing and win-win of the ecosystem have always been the core belief of Arm's operation. The Arm Neoverse ecosystem has maintained steady growth since its launch in 2017. Arm Neoverse is positioned to target four market segments in the infrastructure market, and the ecosystem also focuses on these four market segments, including the Internet field of ultra-large-scale public clouds, high-performance computing, 5G/network fields, and edge device gateways.

"In the cloud field, Arm can be said to have achieved the most relatively leading success. AWS, Oracle, Tencent, and Baidu are all designing and optimizing their application software, operating systems, middleware, etc. based on the Arm architecture. In terms of HPC, Fugaku's supercomputer has once again succeeded in HPC performance testing. In terms of 5G, Lenovo and Sunsea in China and Nokia and Samsung abroad have adopted Arm technology. Edge computing is a relatively mature market, and Arm also hopes to achieve success in this field through the product strengths of partners including NXP, Marvell, NVIDIA, etc." said Zou Ting.

Taking the cloud native ecosystem as an example, Zou Ting introduced that in terms of international open source communities, Arm plays a very active community member in CNCF, a project of the Linux Foundation. In these cloud native open source communities, Arm has invested a large number of technical personnel in development, and has also invested a lot of resources to carry out a series of cooperation with partners in the open source community. In China, Arm also actively participates in domestic open source organizations, communities, or projects, such as TARS or OpenAnolis. Through technical exchanges, it works with domestic partners to better enable domestic cloud native software, especially domestic cloud native software, to run quickly on the Arm architecture.