ARM

Boring. That’s a word many people use to describe the server industry, although unexciting and uneventful would be a better fit. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because when something “exciting” happens to a server, it usually involves blue smoke and downtime. Luckily, the server space is about to get a bit more exciting, thanks to the introduction of servers based on ARM processors.

In this post, Toptal Technical Editor and resident chip geek Nermin Hajdarbegovic explains why ARM processors could end up powering a server near you, and what this means for the software industry. The potential implications of ARM servers are huge, but there is no cause for alarm. This industry segment does not tend to evolve fast, and developers will have plenty of time to get ready.

With Dalvik out of the picture, many people expected Google’s new 64-bit capable ART runtime to stick around for years, which it probably will, but it will get a major overhaul in the near future. In addition to offering support for 64-bit hardware, ART also introduced ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, while Dalvik was a just-in-time (JIT) compiler.

Throw in new 10-core ARM processors and Intel mobile processors based on three different architectures, and you end up with spicy, Google-style hardware gumbo.