Bert Shen, vice president of technology business development at the financial services firm told Computerworld  AppliedMicro showed it a benchmark that compelled it to take a closer look at ARM.

"They ran a very relevant columnar database benchmark for us and got a 5x performance improvement per rack compared to an Intel Haswell EP solution. We thought this was about the right time to bring in a proof of concept.”

In a small test running a few ARM cartridges in an HP Moonshot chassis but it could be the beginning of something much bigger.

While ARM is traditionally touted for cost and heading reasons, Morgan Stanley is interested in performance and the fact it did not like relying on one supplier – in this case Intel.

AMD is technically a second supplier of x86 server processors, but it has not been worth considering for a while, he said.