Not long ago x86 processors’ dominance in the data center and hyperscale spaces was uncontested. Today, Intel and AMD face new competition from a swath of chipmakers championing Arm-based data-center chips with more cores, lower power consumption, and greater scalability.

And according to Arm’s Senior Director of Software Architecture Kevin Ryan, Arm’s rapid rise in the data center is thanks in no small part to open source software and the rise of cloud computing.

Ryan explained that it’s one thing to have great silicon, but without software to make it useful, it's going to be a tough sell. And without compelling hardware, software developers have little reason to build for it. “The question is why would you build software if people aren’t deploying, and there isn’t a customer base,” he said.

It’s this kind of chicken-and-egg scenario that Arm was facing as it sought to move beyond low-power electronics like smartphones, tablets, and IoT into the data center. “Three or four years ago people may have said [Arm is] cheaper, but it’s not that performant,” Ryan said.

So, to break the cycle, Arm tackled the issue from both ends, adopting a “build it and they will come” type mentality to the data center market while working with software vendors and the open source community to build relationships and bring software to the Arm64 architecture.

“Arm made a strategic investment in going after the hyperscale and data center market,” Ryan said. “None of this would be possible unless the Arm silicon roadmap weren't so compelling.”

These developments gave rise to Neoverse, a microarchitecture designed specifically for the hyperscale, data center, and networking markets. Neoverse attempted to balance high performance and scalability with the company’s famous power efficiency.

Neoverse spurred the creation of chips like Amazon’s Graviton2, Marvell’s ThunderX-series processors, and Ampere’s Altra and Altra Max. More importantly, the chip’s power efficiency and high core counts made them attractive to public cloud providers and hyperscalers.

Arm chips have now been deployed across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracles public cloud offerings.

“The launch of Neoverse sent a message to the market that has maybe gone under-appreciated,” wrote Matt Kimball, senior analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, in an article contributed to Forbes. “That message is this: Arm is invested in the data center, from cloud to edge to enterprise.”

“The silicon and processor capabilities have to be there, but on top of that, getting the software ecosystem in place is a much different world than it was 10 years ago,” Ryan said. “When I started two and a half years ago, if we needed a community or a piece of open source software ... it was a bit of a lift on our part. We had to either convince [them] or do it ourselves.”

However, with the rise of cloud-native architectures, monolithic applications of old have given way to new applications built on modern programming languages like Node.js, Java, Go, and Python. “These languages are really focused on being hardware agnostic — not that there aren’t challenges — but they are designed to be more abstracted than the old monolithic applications that were finely tuned for a specific [instruction set architecture] or a different architecture,” Ryan explained. “Most applications now are being written atop open source software.”

This, Ryan said, was critical as it meant that Arm was able to take a more active role in the software development. “What it has done for Arm is allowed us to really accelerate our relevance in those parts of the network stack and the data center stack because we and our partners are open to contribute to those open source projects and build in Arm support,” he said.

According to Kimball, this early leg work was critical to ensuring development teams were ready to take advantage of new chips as they arrived.

“Arm’s team began building the ecosystem in the early days of its jump into the server market, and the momentum picked up under the leadership of Drew Henry and Mohamed Awad,” he wrote. “The launch of Neoverse signaled a real commitment to the data center, and the team wisely focused on strategic partners such as Red Hat, Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, and Nginx.”

As more enterprises began to shift workloads out of the private data center and into the public cloud, the value proposition of high-performance, low-power processors — based on the Neoverse architecture — began to become clearer, Ryan added.

“If you look at the data now, in a lot of cases [Neoverse-based chips are] more performant than traditional x86 architectures,” he said. “I think that chicken and egg problem has really started to turn into a flywheel where there is more and more usage of Arm in the data center, and that’s attracting the open source community.”

Arm support among key open source communities has changed dramatically in the last few years.

“It’s not about Arm doing the heavy lift and convincing people anymore,” Ryan said. “People have genuinely bought into the value proposition of Arm both in the hyperscale and edge. It's compelling.”

Today, almost every major Linux distribution, including some of the most popular varieties like Ubuntu, SUSE, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux have native Arm support.

“Half the time I don’t even know what’s being added to the ecosystem because it’s just happening,” he said.

While Ryan believes that Arm would have eventually broken into the data center market, even without the open source community, he still believes that the shift away from monolithic applications to open source-based cloud-native applications was a key accelerant in Arm's adoption in the hyperscale data center.