Arm’s ambitions

Arm’s ambitions for the server market has been a very long journey that’s taken years to materialise.
After many doubts and false start attempts, today in 2020 nobody can deny that sever chips
powered by the company’s CPU IP are not only competitive, but actually class-leading on several
metrics.

Amazon’s Graviton2 64-core Neoverse N1 server chip is the first of what should become a wider
range of designs that will be driving the Arm server ecosystem forward and actively assaulting the
infrastructure CPU market share that’s currently dominated by the x86 players such as Intel and
AMD.
The journey has been a long one, but has had its roots back in roadmaps publicly planned laid out
by the company back in 2018. Fast-forward to 2020, not only have we seen products with the first-
generation Neoverse N1 infrastructure CPU IP hit the market in commercial and publicly available
form, but we’ve seen the company exceed their targeted 30% generational gain by a factor of 2x.
The Neoverse V1: A New Maximum Performance Tier Infrastructure CPU

Today, we’re ready to take the next step towards the next generation of the Neoverse platform, not
only revealing the CPU microarchitecture previously known as Zeus, but a whole new product
category that goes beyond the Neoverse N-series: Introducing the new Neoverse V-series and the
Neoverse V1 (Zeus), as well as a new roadmap insertion in the form of the Neoverse N2 (Perseus).

The new Neoverse V1 introduces the new V-series into Arm’s infrastructure IP portfolio, and
essentially this represents the company’s push for higher absolute performance, no matter the cost.

Earlier this spring we covered the company’s new mobile Cortex-X1 CPU IP which represented
significant business model change for Arm: Instead of offering only a single one-fits-all CPU
microarchitecture which licensees had to make due with in a wider range of designs and
performance points, we’ve now seen a divergence of the microarchitectures, with one IP offering
now focusing on pure maximum performance (Cortex-X1), no matter the area or power cost, while
the other design (Cortex-A78) focuses on Arm’s more traditional maximised PPA (Power,
Performance, Area) design philosophy.