Arm in the enterprise is at least three years away, says Broadcom software boss
And RISC-V is absolutely nowhere
Broadcom’s software boss, Ram Velaga, predicts that Arm servers will not achieve significant market share in the enterprise for at least three to five years. This is concerning for hardware vendors who are considering Arm servers, as buyers may be less interested in the devices if they cannot manage them using the tools they already employ.
VMware, the leading enterprise server virtualization supplier, currently dominates the market and its users will not be able to readily adopt Arm servers without them becoming a silo. Velaga, who recently took on the role of leader of Broadcom’s software business, has been in charge of the former VMware, Symantec, and CA business units since January 1.
During VMware’s Explore conference in Las Vegas, he emphasized that the company's mission remains unchanged – to serve as an abstraction layer for CPU and GPU, regardless of the instruction set. VMware currently specializes in virtualizing servers, storage, and networks on x86 servers, but has expanded to support Nvidia, AMD, and Intel GPUs.
The business unit has also worked on SmartNIC/Data Processing Units, and developed a version of its hypervisor to run in SmartNICs for VMware's distributed services engine. While VMware is making progress on this front, Velaga believes it will be several years before Arm servers have a significant presence in the enterprise, and thus VMware does not need to prioritize a hypervisor for Arm servers in the near term.
He also expressed skepticism about the potential of RISC-V processors, stating that VMware customers have no interest in them at present. Velaga revealed that around 60% of Broadcom’s $5 billion annual research and development budget is spent on maintaining and updating VMware's current products, while the remaining funds go towards developing new products such as the recently announced AI factory.
As AI gains prominence, it is clear that VMware's research and development efforts will likely focus on that area in the coming years.
Written by urgent.news from The Register's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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