Data Centers Drive Adoption Of ARM-Based Servers
ARM processors have jumped from the mobile world to the server world, with proposals generating a lot of interest in the business and cloud world. Experts say that data centers will be the main drivers of their adoption in the coming years, predicting that their market penetration could reach 22% by 2025.
In recent years, ARM processor technology has conquered the mobile and IoT industry, and its development has continued until the advent of server processors. Cloud providers have been early adopters of ARM-based servers. The data center industry, in general, is increasingly interested in this technology, which promises to improve the flexibility of services.
According to the latest report published on this market, the penetration rate of ARM servers will continue to grow in the coming years, reaching 22% in 2025. And they consider that data centers will be the main drivers of its adoption since they find essential advantages in this technology to solve the challenges derived from the digital transformation of organizations. They point to three main benefits: the ability to support highly diverse and changing workloads while being more scalable and cost-effective.
The second benefit is that ARM processors allow customization for different market niches with a more flexible ecosystem. The third is that they occupy a relatively small physical space, given their capabilities, which is very attractive for constructing micro data centers. In their report, researchers highlight that the leading cloud providers and telecom operators are increasingly betting on this type of small data centers. For this, they will increasingly opt for ARM-based servers.
In addition, they point out that in 2021 there has been a greater penetration of ARM-based computing platforms, especially by AWS, which has accelerated the use of its Graviton systems, becoming an example for other companies in the sector. Last year the implementation of ARM processors by AWS reached a penetration of 15%, and this year the percentage is expected to increase to 20%. This will lead other cloud service providers to follow the same path, and experts predict that they will invest in developing their ARM platforms in different foundries and products that could massively reach the market in 2025.
Another key driver of processor penetration will be ARM’s Neoverse platform roadmap, intended primarily for use in large-scale data centers and edge computing infrastructures. Although experts say that the strength of x86 platforms in the global server market should not be lost sight of, for now, they continue to largely dominate the server market, monopolizing high-volume orders and deployments.
Meanwhile, at the moment, ARM CPU-based servers are only starring in small batch production orders, targeting large data centers, and their presence in the enterprise market is still marginal. Therefore, experts believe it will be difficult for ARM-based servers to compete with those based on the x86 architecture before 2025.
