Arm continued its quest to become the dominant computing platform across the board today announcing the successful trial of Arm-based universal CPE (uCPE) appliances in collaboration with NXP Semiconductors, Telco Systems, and Vodafone in the United Kingdom.

In a blog post, Eddie Ramirez, senior director of marketing for Arm's infrastructure business, explained that Arm-based uCPE has the opportunity to lower costs, improve energy efficiency, and accelerate the performance of networking equipment.

Citing initiatives like ServerReady and the Telecom Infra Project's (TIP) Project Cassini, Ramirez said an ecosystem of Arm-based devices is ready to reshape the market.

"Arm has already shown it can deliver the performance needed for uCPE in a new class of power efficiency not seen before, with Arm-based uCPE solutions operating at 35 [watts] typical power consumption or about one-third the power of alternative x86 uCPE systems," he wrote.

To put this theory to the test, Arm worked with NXP Semiconductors and Telco Systems to develop a proof of concept uCPE appliance running virtual network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNF).

"Arm-based uCPEs running cloud-native software stacks can be scaled from four to 32 cores and provide enterprise-grade connectivity services to a broad set of markets," Ramirez wrote.

The proof of concept was rather simple and not all that different from a traditional white-box appliance running on Intel or AMD hardware. But rather than x86 hardware, the appliance leveraged Arm Neoverse-based chips from NXP and VNFs for functions like SD-WAN, firewall, and routing from Telco Systems' NFVTime platform.

The hardware was deployed by Vodafone in small to mid-sized business and enterprise use cases across the U.K.

"The Vodafone team successfully deployed and managed VNF and CNF applications running on an efficient 4-core Arm Cortex-A72 processor with a typical power consumption of 35 [watts]. Following this success, on an 8-core Arm processor, they delivered an impressive 15 Gb/s throughput of [internet mix] traffic by offloading [Open vSwitch] to hardware acceleration blocks demonstrating the ability to handle demanding traffic requirements," wrote Ramirez. "Combined together, these results highlight this solution’s high performance and low carbon footprint."

Marvell is no stranger to Arm-based infrastructure, either. The chipmaker offers a suite of chips that, thanks to Marvell's newly launched custom ASIC program, can be tailored specifically to the customer's needs.

At the heart of Marvell's chips lies a general-purpose Arm CPU. These cores are based on TSMC's 7-nanometer manufacturing process and use the same Arm Neoverse architecture used by NXP in the Arm uCPE trial.

And like NXP's Layerscape processors, Marvell's chips can be equipped with a number of accelerator blocks enabling specific workloads to be offloaded to hardware, which is not possible on traditional x86 chips.

While Arm software support remains a challenge, there has been considerable progress made in recent years as Arm-based processors have gained traction in everything from network infrastructure like routing and switching to the data center.

Marvell's latest switch chips, launched last week, include support for network operating systems like the Linux Foundation's DENT project and Open Compute Project’s SONiC.

"With a growing number of software partners, and early adopters such as Vodafone, Arm is showing the world it can deliver a flexible uCPE solution," wrote Ramirez.

While uCPE represents a new market opportunity for Arm, the chip designer's future remains very much in question.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that Nvidia was in talks with Japanese conglomerate SoftBank to acquire Arm for more than $32 billion. Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports Nvidia aims to reach a deal with SoftBank within the next few weeks.

Previously, The Wall Street Journal reported SoftBank was considering a partial or full sale of the chip designer or even an initial public offering.

Arm's interest in uCPE somewhat contrasts its intent to spin off its IoT business, which would be managed by SoftBank. The opportunity to capitalize on the IoT market reportedly motivated SoftBank's $32 billion acquisition of Arm in 2016, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Even if Nvidia and SoftBank move forward on the rumored acquisition, the deal will likely face regulatory hurdles.

However, CCS Insight VP of Research Geoff Blaber argued in a recent report that Nvidia was unlikely to meaningfully influence Arms roadmap for this very reason. "Any intention to exert control over the future direction of the Arm architecture and bend it toward Nvidia’s own needs would be very unlikely to pass intense regulatory scrutiny," he wrote.