China Hosts 40% of all Arm-based Servers in the World

[AleksandarK]

The escalating challenges in acquiring high-performance x86 servers have prompted Chinese data center companies to accelerate the shift to Arm-based system-on-chips (SoCs). Investment banking firm Bernstein reports that approximately 40% of all Arm-powered servers globally are currently being used in China. While most servers operate on x86 processors from AMD and Intel, there's a growing preference for Arm-based SoCs, especially in the Chinese market. Several global tech giants, including AWS, Ampere, Google, Fujitsu, Microsoft, and Nvidia, have already adopted or developed Arm-powered SoCs. However, Arm-based SoCs are increasingly favorable for Chinese firms, given the difficulty in consistently sourcing Intel's Xeon or AMD's EPYC. Chinese companies like Alibaba, Huawei, and Phytium are pioneering the development of these Arm-based SoCs for client and data center processors.

However, the US government's restrictions present some challenges. Both Huawei and Phytium, blacklisted by the US, cannot access TSMC's cutting-edge process technologies, limiting their ability to produce competitive processors. Although Alibaba's T-Head can leverage TSMC's latest innovations, it can't license Arm's high-performance computing Neoverse V-series CPU cores due to various export control rules. Despite these challenges, many chip designers are considering alternatives such as RISC-V, an unrestricted, rapidly evolving open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) suitable for designing highly customized general-purpose cores for specific workloads. Still, with the backing of influential firms like AWS, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Samsung, the Armv8 and Armv9 instruction set architectures continue to hold an edge over RISC-V. These companies' support ensures that the software ecosystem remains compatible with their CPUs, which will likely continue to drive the adoption of Arm in the data center space.



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[lemonadesoda]

If you are prepared to leave Windows, then ARM is the better scalable microprocessor. An example of sanctions that hurt shortterm, require a structural shift, but in the longterm don’t hurt the target only the US. Also known as backfire.

 

[AnotherReader]

If you are prepared to leave Windows, then ARM is the better scalable microprocessor. An example of sanctions that hurt shortterm, require a structural shift, but in the longterm don’t hurt the target only the US. Also known as backfire.

There's nothing magical about ARM. When scaled to x86 like power levels, it doesn't have earth shattering performance. The good thing about ARM from China's perspective is that designing an ARM based CPU is cheaper especially given what they did to ARM China: outright mutiny.

Going with RISC-V is silly for high performance cores as there are no RISC-V cores comparable to ARM's Neoverse cores. At that point, you would have to design a high performance core which is an expensive undertaking. It would be cheaper to engage in industrial espionage and just steal ARM's latest designs.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

If you are prepared to leave Windows, then ARM is the better scalable microprocessor. An example of sanctions that hurt shortterm, require a structural shift, but in the longterm don’t hurt the target only the US. Also known as backfire.

Linux runs just fine on x86 hardware, you know.

There's nothing magical about ARM. When scaled to x86 like power levels, it doesn't have earth shattering performance. The good thing about ARM from China's perspective is that designing an ARM based CPU is cheaper especially given what they did to ARM China: outright mutiny.

Which is hilarious. How did they expect this to go any differently?

Going with RISC-V is silly for high performance cores as there are no RISC-V cores comparable to ARM's Neoverse cores. At that point, you would have to design a high performance core which is an expensive undertaking. It would be cheaper to engage in industrial espionage and just steal ARM's latest designs.

RISC-V investment makes total sense in places like the US, where IP law is enforced and ARM holdings has gotten very greedy. The new rules they tried to impose on Qualcomm said it all, you will use ALL ARM tech or no license for you, also you pay more if you sell more expensive devices!

 

[R0H1T]

There's nothing magical about ARM. When scaled to x86 like power levels, it doesn't have earth shattering performance. The good thing about ARM from China's perspective is that designing an ARM based CPU is cheaper especially given what they did to ARM China: outright mutiny.

Well that's rather old news, almost 2 years old, this is the latest I could find still relatively old of course ~

Arm wrests back control of its rogue China limb

Ouster of rebel CEO should clear path for planned Arm IPO

www.theregister.com

Also don't expect everything that happens in the shadows background to be revealed to the public, especially from inside China.

 

[mrnagant]

If you are prepared to leave Windows, then ARM is the better scalable microprocessor. An example of sanctions that hurt shortterm, require a structural shift, but in the longterm don’t hurt the target only the US. Also known as backfire.

You don't even have to be prepared to leave Windows. Linux already sees very heavy use in the server world. I think the main pain from sanctions is just going to be business profits, but then American companies are still doing just fine. And with the shift to AI, there is going to be loads of money to rake in still. I think the idea is more to slow China's progression down by being more difficult to access better processors. That will backfire once and if China can start making superior processors of their own.

 

[AnotherReader]

Well that's rather old news, almost 2 years old, this is the latest I could find still relatively old of course ~

Arm wrests back control of its rogue China limb

Ouster of rebel CEO should clear path for planned Arm IPO

www.theregister.com

Also don't expect everything that happens in the shadows background to be revealed to the public, especially from inside China.

You're right that the situation is opaque, especially in China, but note that despite the resolution of the problem, ARM China was rogue for a long while, and it's a really bad precedent.

Linux runs just fine on x86 hardware, you know.


Which is hilarious. How did they expect this to go any differently?

RISC-V investment makes total sense in places like the US, where IP law is enforced and ARM holdings has gotten very greedy. The new rules they tried to impose on Qualcomm said it all, you will use ALL ARM tech or no license for you, also you pay more if you sell more expensive devices!

Big companies like Qualcomm can, of course, afford the R&D to design a competitive RISC-V core, but the appeal of ARM, before their recent shenanigans, was that you had a range of cores covering a continuum of use cases, power draw, and performance to choose from. On top of all that, the fee to license those cores was very reasonable so even smaller companies could roll out an ARM core. With RISC-V, rolling out a core competitive with x86 is a lot more work.

 

[Mussels]

China loves having a big Arm-y


They didn't wanna take the Risc with alternatives.

Linux runs just fine on x86 hardware, you know.

I think he meant that windows doesnt run great on Arm