Arm unveils Neoverse, new brand for evolving internet infrastructure

Arm on Tuesday unveiled Neoverse, a new brand of technology designed to power infrastructure from the data center to the edge. An accompanying product roadmap aims to achieve 30 percent annual system performance gains on leading-edge process nodes.

Neoverse should address a range of use cases, according to Drew Henry, SVP and GM of Arm's Infrastructure Line of Business, including hyperscale cloud data centers, storage solutions, and 5G networks. It's designed to support the new wave of computing that's focused on developing and deploying smart devices at the edge, he told reporters last week.

"The global internet will need to be architected over the next decade to accommodate this world of a trillion intelligent devices," he said. Internet infrastructure, he continued, will have to consider the way devices will generate data, as well as how that data is processed and shared.

"We are uniquely positioned as a company" to consider the infrastructure implications, Henry said, "because we are involved with discussions in every major leading company in the world that is trying to decide how to deploy these [connected] systems."

Arm currently has nearly 30 percent market share in the global internet infrastructure market, which includes top of rack switches, servers, WAN routers, gateways and cellular base stations.

The Neoverse processor IP roadmap begins with the launch of the Ares IP platform in early 2019 on 7nm. The Zeus platform will follow in 2020 on 7nm, and the Poseidon platform will come in 2021 on 5nm. Each generation will come with 30 percent performance gains and new features, Arm says.

"These new platforms... allow partners to build whatever infrastructure products they want," Henry said.