Cavium, which is a leader among ARM server solutions, with its Thunder X platform, is already seeing deployments in China and expects more than 5 customers in production by year-end. It expects a groundswell of activity in 2017-18 in this space as new competitors come in and the ecosystem matures.
Cavium feels that ARM server solutions are currently tailored for specific workloads that involve a lot of parallelism like database queries, deep learning etc, which can benefit from many-core CPUs. Cavium is working on its second generation ARM server chipsets with tapeouts expected this year. JPM view - ARM server and datacenter penetration is a key part of our TSMC OW thesis with growth likely to come through from 2018 once TSMC 7nm ramps and the ecosystem also becomes more mature. In the interim, accelerator solutions like GPUs, FPGA and in-house silicon designs (like recently announced Google TPUs) should continue to drive the datacenter opportunity.
