New Arm Extension for GitHub Copilot Simplifies and Accelerates Migration to Arm-based Servers

In today’s fast-paced technology landscape, developers need tools to simplify workflows, reduce costs, and boost efficiency. For developers, AI-assisted tools are quickly becoming essential. Over 25% already use these tools for tasks like code generation, test case creation, bug fixes, and security detection, significantly improving productivity. Today, we are pleased to announce the general availability of the Arm extension for GitHub Copilot, the world’s most widely deployed AI developer tool, making Arm-based technology more accessible and developer-friendly for millions of Copilot users.

A recent Accenture report found GitHub Copilot increases coding speed by 55% and developer confidence by 85%. With over a million paid users across 20,000+ enterprises, Copilot users average a staggering 3.4 days of usage per week. The Arm extension for GitHub Copilot has been specifically designed to simplify migration to the Arm architecture, reducing development time and costs. The extension is initially focused on servers and cloud environments with plans to extend to use-cases including mobile, IoT, software-defined vehicles and Windows on Arm development. Simply call @arm within GitHub Copilot Chat and gain access to curated code examples, best practices and migration strategies, and performance optimization tips designed for Arm-based development.

And for the first time, a complete CI/CD pipeline – featuring GitHub Actions, Arm Runners, and the Arm extension for GitHub Copilot – is fully available on Arm for free to developers everywhere.

“The Arm Extension for GitHub Copilot is game-changing for developers. They can now take advantage of Arm intrinsics and Arm architectural features to make their software more performant and efficient. The extension will make it easier than ever for our customers to migrate their workloads to the lower-cost, power-efficient Arm servers we are seeing everywhere in the cloud. It will also help them create CI/CD and MLOps pipelines that are Arm native with the latest Arm Runners for GitHub Actions.”- Rinat Shagisultanov, VP of Technology, Modern Dev & DevOps Services, InfoMagnus

“What blew me away wasn’t just that the Arm extension could help with code – it was how it gave real context about the Arm architecture. When I asked about setting up CI/CD for Kubernetes, it didn’t just give me generic responses – it pointed me directly to Arm’s learning paths and actual documentation. The difference between receiving generic, unhelpful guidance and getting legitimate, architecture-specific guidance from Arm is critical to efficiency.” – Jeremy Sinclair, Software & AppSec Architect and Microsoft MVP in Windows Development and .NET

You can find out how developers are leveraging GitHub Copilot and Arm Runners to build, test, and deploy seamlessly, simplifying workflows and significantly boosting efficiency in this blog.

Empowering Developers with the Arm Extension for GitHub Copilot and Native CI/CD

By continuing to update our intelligence platform with Arm-curated data and best practices, the Arm extension will evolve to support a wide range of applications including:

• Generative AI: Simplify the creation and deployment of AI applications.
• Mobile and Gaming: Optimize apps for performance on Arm-based platforms.
• IoT and Software-Defined Vehicles: Seamless workflows for cloud-to-edge and cloud-to-car deployment.

Arm now offers a fully integrated development environment, including CI/CD and MLOps pipelines with GitHub Actions’ Arm-hosted Runners. And with the recent announcement of free Github Runners for Arm, developers gain access to a fully integrated native Arm workflow that streamlines development from cloud-to-edge for any market.

Using GitHub Actions, developers can build end-to-end MLOps workflows that combine and automate each step in the machine learning lifecycle. By running these workflows natively on Arm-based platforms, developers can unlock significant advantages for AI/ML applications, especially in cloud-to-edge optimization.

The Arm extension for GitHub Copilot adds yet another layer of efficiency by providing developers with tailored, architecture-specific answers. GitHub Copilot Extensions will make it easy for developers to adopt Arm architecture features like BF16, and I8MM as well as the latest Armv9 architecture features in the native Azure Cobalt 100 GitHub Runners, including SVE2 which accelerates machine learning performance.

Together, GitHub Actions, the latest Cobalt 100 native Arm Runners, and the Arm extension for GitHub Copilot will enable developers to streamline workflows, optimize costs, and achieve better outcomes in every stage of their MLOps journey.

The future of Arm-based development

As Arm continues to work on the extension, future updates will support an even broader range of devices, from Android and gaming platforms to embedded systems and software-defined vehicles.

Arm is committed to being the trusted platform for developers and we are excited to continue our work with our ecosystem partners to ensure developers can take advantage of the latest Arm platform capabilities from day one, across every segment of compute.