Intel outside as Arm's data center CPU share grows to 25%

"During the second quarter, Arm CPUs captured a quarter of the server market, according to a recent Dell'Oro Group report. That's up from 15 percent of the server market a year ago, Dell'Oro analyst Baron Fung tells El Reg. The driving force behind this trend is the adoption of Nvidia's Grace-Blackwell rack-scale compute platforms like the GB200 and GB300 NVL72."

"The first of these systems began shipping in small volume late last year. Each of the 120-kilowatt machines is equipped with 72 Blackwell GPUs and 36 of Nvidia's Grace CPUs. The 72-core chips, first introduced in 2022, are based on the British chip designer's Arm Neoverse V2 architecture and have been optimized to maximize data movement by taking advantage of Nvidia's custom NVLink-C2C interface."

"According to Fung, a year ago, Arm's server share was driven almost exclusively by custom cloud silicon like AWS Graviton. Now he says that Grace revenues are comparable to cloud GPUs. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been dealing in custom Arm silicon going back to 2018. However, it's only in the last few years that Microsoft and Google have taken the RISC instruction set seriously with their Cobalt and Axion CPUs, respectively."

Arm CPUs attained 25 percent of the server market in the second quarter, up from 15 percent a year earlier. The surge is driven by adoption of Nvidia Grace-Blackwell rack-scale systems such as the GB200 and GB300 NVL72. Those racks pair 72 Blackwell GPUs with 36 Grace CPUs in 120-kilowatt configurations and use Arm Neoverse V2-based 72-core Grace chips optimized for NVLink-C2C data movement. Initial shipments began late last year, with refreshed Blackwell Ultra racks arriving in the second quarter and early deliveries to neocloud operators. Custom cloud silicon beyond AWS Graviton is increasingly contributing to Arm server share.

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