Red Hat, Oracle, Cloudera and Citrix all announced development plans for 64-bit ARM hardware. And Linaro said it had kicked off a multi-vendor effort to develop some standards around Linux on ARM.

This comes on the back of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) announced it would build ARM-based server chips, and Dell showed a prototype 64-bit ARM server, using some of the first sample silicon from Applied Micro Circuits.

The software vendors joined AppliedMicro during a session at ARM's TechCon conference to announce their support for its ARMv8 architecture, which includes the 64-bit extensions. Proponents say ARM servers will be significantly more energy efficient for certain cloud and big-data analytics workloads, though there's little information yet about how they perform in real-world tests.