Chinese data centers are accelerating the deployment of Arm servers over traditional x86 servers
In recent years, servers based on the Arm architecture have been claiming an ever-growing share of the market. An array of corporations, including AWS, Ampere, Google, Fujitsu, Microsoft, and Nvidia, have all created a series of Arm processors. Some of these are custom products designed for their own hyperscale data center applications, while others are openly available models. This implies that Intel and AMD must not only vie with each other for market dominance but also confront common competitors.
The burgeoning presence of Arm servers is not restricted to multinational corporations or cloud service providers. Their market share has been progressively expanding in the Chinese market as well. As reported by @EricJhonsa, data from the investment bank Bernstein indicates that Chinese data centers are accelerating the deployment of Arm servers over traditional x86 servers, currently holding 40% of the global Arm server market.
Numerous Chinese companies, including Alibaba, Huawei, and Phytium, have developed Arm processors. Huawei and China Electronics have previously announced a merger of the Kunpeng and PKS ecosystems to jointly create the ‘Pengteng’ ecosystem, supporting both Kunpeng and Phytium processors. In recent years, for well-known reasons, certain Chinese enterprises have been subject to export controls from Europe and America, hindering their use or purchase of certain equipment and technologies, such as TSMC’s cutting-edge manufacturing process.
Apart from the Arm architecture, China’s interests have also been drawn to the RISC-V architecture. As an open standard instruction set architecture, RISC-V is free from restrictions and can design highly customized general-purpose cores for specific workloads. However, at this stage, the Armv8 and Armv9 architectures hold an edge over RISC-V. For the foreseeable future, Arm servers will continue to expand their market share.
