In the smartphone app development business, getting software to market means weighing whether a program will run as well for a farmer checking the weather in India as for a London banker hurtling to work in the Tube.
A French-American company, Genymobile, provides a cloud-based platform that emulates these different environments, letting big application developers test their Android apps for factors such as what network a phone is using, its location, or how fast it’s traveling.
Using servers running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure based on the Arm microprocessor design, Genymobile can pack up to 10 times as many test devices on each server with big performance gains, compared with servers using conventional chips, CEO Tim Danford estimates.
“It saves our customers time, and it saves them money,” he says. And since Arm chips also run the world’s phones and tablets, “I can trust that it’s bit-for-bit compatible.”
Arm, an alternative to the x86-compatible chips that power the vast majority of today’s servers, is working its way up from devices to data centres.
The chip technology, whose power-saving design led to its use in billions of mobile devices and Apple’s newest desktop and notebook Macs, is gaining ground in cloud computing and high-performance computing centres, thanks to its low cost, flexibility, and speed.
Computers containing Arm chips are expected to account for 3.7% of server spending globally by 2024, up from less than 0.3% in 2019.
The architecture that underpinned the smartphone rise of the 2000s; found its way into cars, fitness devices, and drones; and has been recently winning adherents for heavy-duty cloud computing jobs.
Those include serving web pages to hundreds of millions of users; helping machine learning models with billions of data points make inferences about new data; and running high-performance computing software that simulates the effects of air flow, water, and biomolecular systems.
“I’ve seen interest across the board—in weather prediction, manufacturing, financial services, life sciences, and image recognition,” says Kevin Jorissen, a distinguished high-performance computing cloud architect at Oracle. “Anything that can push down costs 20% is a godsend, and Arm does this. Cloud providers have struggled for years with costs and still do. Running on Arm could make some of these services cheaper to operate.”
In May, Oracle became the latest cloud provider to introduce a cloud computing service based on Arm.
Businesses that use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to power their applications will be able to run servers based on chip designer Ampere Computing’s Altra CPU, which can pack up to 160 processing cores and 4 terabytes of memory in a machine (Oracle’s machines will include up to 1 TB per server). Oracle invests in Ampere and its CEO, Renée James, sits on Oracle’s board.
Oracle is touting the Arm service’s “penny-per-core-hour” pricing and Ampere-based machines’ ability to scale up predictably as users add more processing cores to their applications.
Oracle is also working to certify Oracle Database to run on Arm and has certified Oracle Linux, which would let businesses eke more performance out of their databases.
In high-performance computing, lowering the cost per computing cycle pushes the frontier of solvable problems. Business computing can also benefit from Arm’s lower costs.
Chipmakers and cloud providers are counting on programmers’ familiarity with the architecture from phones and other devices to spur a wave of development on data centre software that’s mostly been written for x86-compatible chips.
After Moore’s Law
In an era when the biennial doubling of semiconductor processing power the computer industry counted on for decades to fuel invention is waning, Arm is stepping into the breach. The chips house many single-threaded cores that execute tasks independently without having to wait for more code.
That suits computing jobs whose components run in parallel to one another such as machine learning and computational fluid dynamics that increasingly run in cloud computing data centres.
Such chips can offer better performance for the same price as server chips based on the x86 design.
“Hardware diversification is where we’ll get the gains,” says Jorissen. “A cloud user can gain performance and cost efficiency by running each task on the processor that does it best.”
Arm’s price-performance edge has to do with the way its chips interact with the software they’re running. The x86 processors use multithreading, in which CPU cores juggle multiple tasks, pausing while they fetch instructions to run.
The approach makes use of spare computing cycles, but can lead to variability in how long a task takes to complete.
With Arm, each core handles a single thread, or set of scheduled instructions, and runs it until it’s done. The result can be a highly predictable processor with a very low number of errors.
Businesses still face hurdles in getting commonly used applications to take advantage of Arm. Many applications for managing financial data, human resources, or customer accounts weren’t written to run on more than about two dozen processing cores.
Enterprise software makers haven’t by and large rewritten their software to run on Arm, either. And Arm isn’t always the best choice for computing jobs that need the highest possible performance per core, such as applications whose licensing fees depend on the number of cores users run.
Meeting the needs of hyper-growth markets, such as artificial intelligence and cloud-based supercomputing, increasingly means turning to specialised hardware. Using Arm designs, cloud providers can cram more servers into data centres while staying within energy budgets.
In the more than US$60 billion cloud computing infrastructure market, small gains in performance or power consumption can add up to big savings. Arm’s customisable blueprint also means cloud providers can tailor chips to their needs rather than buying off-the-shelf products that contain superfluous functions.
The adoption is setting up a battle among established chipmakers and a raft of well-funded startups developing Arm-based chips and computers to supply the silicon for tomorrow’s applications.
Arm’s momentum is attracting entrepreneurs and venture investors. Silicon Valley startup Groq, which raised US$300 million in April, has designed a chip aimed at AI decision-making capable of a quadrillion operations per second.
Graphcore, whose specialised AI chips emphasise memory capacity, in December raised US$222 million, on top of a US$150 million round earlier in the year.
The biggest hurdle when it comes to shifting big enterprise workloads to the cloud, is the database. That’s why Oracle certified its Oracle Instant Client for writing and running applications that connect to Oracle Database and for Oracle Linux running on Arm.
Further out, Oracle plans to certify Oracle Database server code running on Linux for Arm as well.
IDC analyst Ashish Nadkarni says the moves may provide businesses more reasons to add Arm to their mix. He adds that “if you’re talking about enterprise applications, you can’t have that conversation without talking about the Oracle Database. Your biggest hurdle to porting an enterprise workload is the complex database. It’s the start of a big journey.”
