What is ARM?
ARM is a processor design known for doing a lot of work on very little power. It runs most phones and tablets, and it is now found in many newer laptops and a growing number of servers.
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What it means
Arm, the company, makes its money by licensing processor designs to chip makers, who build them into their own products. That is why many different companies sell ARM-based chips, each with its own features.
ARM is a RISC design, with a simpler set of instructions than x86, and for decades ARM chips have been designed mainly for battery-powered devices. That focus, more than the instruction set itself, is why they run cool and use little electricity. The main alternative is x86, used in most traditional PCs and servers. A program built for one family does not run directly on the other.
Why it matters to a business
- Battery life and heat: low power use is why ARM suits phones, tablets and thin laptops, and it can also reduce the electricity a server draws.
- Application support: an older Windows program written for x86 may need a translation layer, run slowly, or not work at all on an ARM computer.
- Operating system support: Linux and many server tools offer ARM versions, but not every package or container image does. Confirm before you plan around it.
- Mixed fleets: a company with phones, tablets and PCs already runs more than one processor family, and support has to cover each.
How this shows up in our work
When a client is weighing ARM laptops or servers, we first check that the business applications run on the hardware and operating system involved. The answer can differ for a Linux server, a container workload, and a desktop program, so we test each one.
Related services
Managed IT
Device planning, patching and support for mixed fleets.
Linux and Kubernetes
Server and container platforms checked against your hardware.
Learn more
- ARM architecture family on WikipediaA neutral history of the design and its versions.
- Arm websiteInformation from the company that designs and licenses the processors, aimed at people who build products with them.
Thinking about ARM hardware?
List the programs your staff run every day. We will check each one and tell you which work on ARM.
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