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“Intel builds on more than 20 years of work in the x86-based ecosystem,” said Lisa Spelman, Intel corporate vice president. “We ensure software compatibility and high performance, important requirements for both consumers and data center customers.”
Amazon also continues to expand its use of Intel chips for some jobs. On Tuesday it announced a plan to run Intel-powered Mac mini computers in its data centers to help programmers develop software for Apple systems without using Apple hardware.
But Arm is becoming increasingly competitive in computing, said Rene Haas, president of Arm’s core product group. He said Arm has made key changes to boost the computing performance of each processor core, or the individual calculation engines arranged in each piece of silicon.
Cloud-style computing tasks can also better exploit many relatively simple cores and special-purpose circuits, Amazon’s DeSantis said. Its Arm-based chip, called Graviton2, has 64 such cores compared to up to 24 more powerful cores in Intel’s server chips, it said. This helps you perform simultaneous computing tasks, such as serving web pages to different people.
Ampere, a chip startup in Santa Clara, California, has developed an 80-core Arm server chip and expects to release a 128-core version next year. Renée James, Ampere CEO, said her clients and investors include software giant Oracle, which plans to offer a cloud computing service based on Ampere chips.
Arm “is real with Amazon,” James said. “Your competitors will follow your example.”
Gerard Williams III, CEO of Nuvia, another startup promoting Arm-based chips, said Arm supporters have also benefited as Intel has lost leadership in driving manufacturing innovations that make the chips do more at a lower cost. Chip makers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung Electronics can now pack more features into each silicon segment, meaning Arm chip designers using them can achieve speed advantages.
The change is manifesting itself in many forms of computing. In laptops, Gartner, the research firm, predicted that Apple’s new Macs and rivals’ responses would propel Arm-based PCs to 13.5 percent of the market by 2024, down from 1.1 percent in this year.
