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The industry will move to ARM-based processors in 2022

By Kosten Metreweli, Chief Marketing Officer, Sunlight.io

Enterprises are looking to provide a more responsive, real-time experience to their customers. At the same time, there are new technologies that are generating increasing amounts of data ‘in the field' - whether from sensors or video devices. The traditional centralized cloud can't support these data-intensive use cases - especially when applying AI for real-time decision making.

The current pandemic, coupled with advances in technology, are changing all aspects of the way people live and work and this is impacting all industries - retail, health, energy, and manufacturing to name a few. More data is being generated and processed than ever before which needs managing and processing in near real time - often close to the source and in harsh environments. This is leading to a seismic shift towards edge computing.

Edge devices are necessarily constrained, ruggedized, and operate with low power. This is very different from data center environments and is where ARM architecture processors excel, as they are significantly more efficient than the equivalent Intel x86 processor. As edge computing demands rise, so will demands for ARM-based processors - leading to their proliferation in 2022 and the years to come. The industry is already seeing some ‘big moves' in this direction, with the pending ARM acquisition by Nvidia and the recently released Nvidia Jetson AI systems.

The move to ARM won't be restricted to the edge, though, as we will also see an increase in ARM-based processors used in the data center. AWS Graviton is a good example of this, as it is 40% more efficient than the Intel x86 AWS EC2 Instances. So, we can expect to see more of that in 2022 as well.

This quote by Ark Invest sums up the foreseeable move to ARM, "ARM and RISC-V are likely to displace Intel's x86 in the cloud. Together they could grow 45% per year to reach $19 billion in CPU revenue and $100 billion in server revenue by 2030."

Sunlight was born out of a collaboration with ARM in 2013 to build a lightweight hypervisor that could virtualize low-power processors. While we have uniquely supported Arm-based hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions for some time, we are only just starting to see fit-for-purpose hardware with the Arm architecture processors coming onto the market, and we expect to see more over the coming years. For this reason, our focus has been on providing a hybrid HCI that works with both the ARM and x86 architecture processors. Enterprises can deploy their data-intensive edge applications in a hybrid mode wherever the processing needs to happen - whether at the edge, in the cloud or in the data center.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kosten Metreweli, Chief Marketing Officer

Kosten is responsible for the commercial functions at Sunlight. He has over 20 years of management team experience in marketing, sales and product functions at high growth deep tech companies leading to 1 IPO and 2 trade sales so far. Kosten has led market entry programmes in the US, European and APAC markets.

Prior to this, Kosten was a management consultant, helping blue chip companies with their technology strategies.