Arm put smart offload processors in the spotlight at its annual developers’ conference because they are stepping stones to its data center ambitions. The cloud is the latest target for the still-small designer of cores that investor Softbank is betting will be a semiconductor giant someday.

The name is a relatively new handle, but the chips have been around for years. They first emerged as TCP offload engines more than 15 years ago. Now, they sometimes ride network interface cards called smart NICs.

Along with the new smart names, the chips have taken on more jobs. Today, they handle a flexible basket of security, storage, and virtualization tasks.

The chips have big, high-volume customers. Microsoft’s Catapult uses Intel FPGA cards as smart NICs. Amazon’s Nitro uses Arm-based controllers that it acquired in 2015 from startup Annapurna.

The latter chips represent a solid position in the hyperscale data center for Arm, but it’s just a start. These I/O processors are valued generally in double digits, while the processors that they serve sell for 10 to 100 times as much.

Arm-based controllers from Annapurna (circled in red) are key to Amazon’s Nitro services. Click to enlarge. (Source: Amazon)

Arm hopes to bridge its way into the big bucks in part with CCIX, a cache-coherent extension of PCI Express. CCIX is basically the Intel processor bus for the rest of the industry, linking CPUs to accelerators and more.

Today, only one Xilinx FPGA sports a CCIX port. Five other designs are said to be in flight. Initially, they expand PCIe Gen 4 up to 25-Gbits/s speeds. Future versions will leverage Gen 5’s 32G data rates and maybe even extend them to 56G.

By 2020, there should be a decent ecosystem of CCIX processors, accelerators, and switches in the market, perhaps including x86 chips from AMD and even Power processors from IBM. They will provide a broad set of alternatives to the basket of goodies that Intel will offer data centers with its Xeon, Stratix, Nervana, and Optane chips.

Of course, Arm’s partners still need to deliver a set of compelling server SoCs leveraging its new Neoverse cores. But that’s another story.