Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday opened up new avenues for ARM-based chip makers to provide processing power to the data center.

First, the company said it’s collaborating with Cavium Inc. to run Microsoft Azure cloud workloads on Cavium’s ARM-based server processors. Second, Microsoft is teaming up with Qualcomm Inc. to develop an ARM-based version of its Windows Server platform.

The announcements suggests Microsoft is making a significant shift towards ARM processors that to date have failed to make any headway in a data center industry that’s dominated by Intel Corp.’s x86 based servers.

With regards to the first announcement, Cavium said its partnership with Microsoft involves “evaluating and enabling” Azure cloud workloads on its ARM-based ThunderX2 datacenter processor. The partners have been demonstrating web services running on an open-source version of Windows Server that’s used internally to run cloud workloads on ThunderX2 at this week’s Open Compute Summit.

Cavium’s chips is a second-generation 64-bit ARMv8 system-on-chip design that’s built for cloud, data center and High Performance Computing workloads. First-generation ARM-based chips largely failed to make any inroads in the data center, but many believe that the second-generation designs have the potential to do much better, particularly now with the endorsement of a high-profile firm such as Microsoft.

Cavium executives argue that the few data center deployments of its first generation ARM processor have helped to seed an ecosystem of partners interested in the designs. Now, the time is ripe for second-generation ARM-based chips to make a much bigger push.

“We see the second-generation products helping to drive a tipping point for ARM server deployment across a mainstream set of volume applications,” Gopal Hegde, general manager of Cavium’s Data Center Processor Group, said in a statement.

Cavium said its partnership with Microsoft came out following the development of an internal version of Windows Server that supports the 64-bit architecture. The two companies have also been collaborating on a server platform that’s based on Microsoft’s Project Olympus, which is Microsoft’s next-generation hyperscale cloud hardware design that’s envisioned as a new model for open-source hardware development with the OCP community. The platform integrates two ThunderX2 processors in a dual socket configuration. The chip itself integrates multiple custom ARMv8-A cores plus IO connectivity to Microsoft Azure.

Also at the Open Compute Project Summit Wednesday, Microsoft said it’s working with smartphone chipmaker Qualcomm to create an ARM-based Windows Server. In addition, Qualcomm said its second-generation ARM processor, Centriq 2400, is being integrated with the Project Olympus data center design.

Project Olympus “applies a model of open-source collaboration that has been embraced for software but has historically been at odds with the physical demands of developing hardware,” wrote Kushagra Vaid, general manager of Microsoft Azure hardware infrastructure, in a blog post about the initiative. “We’re taking a very different approach by contributing our next-generation cloud hardware designs when they [are about 50 percent] complete.”

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