Arm today extended its processor portfolio to add two offerings that increase the performance-per-socket provided by 50% and performance-per-watt provided by 20%, respectively.
Part of the Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS) family of processors, these third generation Neoverse IP processors include an Arm Neoverse CSS V3 design to improve performance and Arm Neoverse CSS N3 design to improve energy consumption. Arm, for example, envisions the first instances of the N3 being used in networking and data processing units (DPUs) that require thermal design power measurement of as low as 40 watts.
Dermot O’Driscoll, vice president of product solutions for the Infrastructure Line of Business at Arm, said Arm is already working with partners to manufacture these next-generation processors that will find their way onto system-on-chip (SOC) subsystems. Arm assumes responsibility for configuring, optimizing and validating a complete compute subsystem for key use cases on behalf of its partners, he noted.
As part of that effort, Arm is continuing to work with partners to provide early access to SoCs to enable their software development teams to construct applications using simulation and emulation tools as next-generation platforms are being developed and deployed, he added.
That approach helps ensure that software that is optimized for these processors is available at the time when SoCs become available, noted O’Driscoll. Variations of those Arm processors now routinely show up everywhere from the network edge to cloud computing environments to provide IT teams with an alternative to x86 processors that, so far, are not able to match the price/performance of Arm processors that are also more energy efficient.
DevOps teams are under more pressure than ever to improve application performance without increasing the overall carbon footprint of their IT environments. Achieving those goals will require everything from more energy-efficient processors to modernized software that makes optimal use of IT infrastructure resources, especially as more inference engines are deployed to run artificial intelligence (AI) models, noted O’Driscoll.
The challenge right now is many DevOps teams lack the tools needed to track overall energy consumption within the context of their application environment, but as DevOps continues to evolve, it will only be a matter of time before energy consumption metrics become a standard element of an observability platform being relied on to optimize DevOps workflows.
In the meantime, as IT infrastructure environments continue to evolve, IT teams should expect to be deploying applications on a wide range of Arm, X86, graphical processor units (GPUs) and other classes of processors designed to optimize specific types of workflows. At the same time, Arm is advancing the development of “chiplets” that are optimized to run specific types of workloads within a larger SoC rather than deploying different platforms to run a specific class of processors.
It may take a while for IT teams to wrap their arms around all the different processor options that are now at their disposal, but as the number of processor architectures being used continues to expand, the need for DevOps expertise will continue to increase.
