In 2012 few products with Cortex-A15 came in the market. Cortex-A15 is ARM based processor.Previous ARM designs were focused on minimum power use at the expense of performance. In the contrary Cortex-A15 focus on strong performance with low power as secondary goal.
Intel also announced new low power CPUs for targeting data centers. Atom S1200 series has x86 instruction set compatibility in low power system on chip.
ARM will be continuing to do well for mobiles and portable devices. As these use their own OS and power is main factor. For laptops and notebooks, ARM might not be great option because of OS compatibility, still devices like Google’s Chromebook can use ARM.
As cloud computing is considered; there are four types of workloads that should be considered. First is traditional Windows and Linux instances where users like to run random Windows or Linux-based workloads. As with compatibility to thousands of enterprise applications, x86 is the best choice.
For Single-function, tightly-controlled workloads like databases, optimizing the hardware to deliver the best price, performance, and power usage is possible. Usage of ARM or Intel depends upon optimization of power consumption or performance goals respectively.
In cloud computing, if the service provider can not predict exact applications that will be run, so broadly compatible service based on x86 is chosen. Large web properties can optimize with tightly controlled applications. for example Facebook tightly controls what will run on the ARM processors and can port anything that they need to.
Software compatibility is the major obstacle for ARM. ARM has pretty good growth in smartphone and tablet market as no necessity of x86 compatibility. Ultimately, with growth in the portable device market, large ARM-based ecosystem will be formed that could challenge x86 in the data center. For now this is possible for specialized applications. Talking about whole market, it does not seem possible in near future.
