This post is a collaboration between Docker and Arm, demonstrating how Docker MCP Toolkit and the Arm MCP Server work together to simplify architecture migrations.
Moving workloads from x86 to ARM64 architecture has become increasingly important. Organizations seek to reduce cloud costs and improve performance. AWS Graviton, Azure Cobalt, and Google Cloud Axion have made Arm-based computing mainstream, promising 20-40% cost savings and better performance for many workloads.
But here’s the challenge: How do you migrate your applications to Arm without breaking things?
Traditional migration approaches require:
- Manual code analysis for x86-specific dependencies
- Tedious compatibility checks across multiple tools
- Manual performance evaluation
What if you could orchestrate the entire Arm migration workflow from a single interface? Docker MCP Toolkit makes this possible.
By connecting specialized Arm migration tools directly to GitHub Copilot, you can automate compatibility analysis, intrinsic conversion, and performance prediction—all through natural conversation in VS Code.
Here’s what that looks like in practice: You ask GitHub Copilot to migrate your legacy C++ application to ARM64. Copilot doesn’t just tell you what needs changing—it actually executes: scanning your code for x86 intrinsics, converting x86 SIMD intrinsics to Arm SIMD intrinsics, updating your Dockerfile, predicting Arm performance improvements, and creating a pull request with all changes. All through natural conversation in VS Code. No manual porting. No up-front architecture expertise required.
If you have questions about any step in the process, you can directly ask Copilot, which will invoke the Arm MCP Server knowledge base tool. The knowledge base has information pulled directly from all Learning Paths on learn.arm.com, as well as knowledge of all Arm intrinsics, and will both summarize that information for you as well as provide links to the concrete documentation that you can peruse yourself.
Now you might ask – “Can’t I just rebuild my Docker image for ARM64?” True, for most applications. But when you hit that one legacy app with hand-optimized x86 assembly, AVX2 intrinsics, or architecture-specific compiler flags? That’s when Docker MCP Toolkit with the Arm MCP Server becomes essential.
By the end of this guide, you’ll migrate a real-world legacy application—a matrix multiplication benchmark written with AVX2 intrinsics for x86—to ARM64 automatically using GitHub Copilot and Docker MCP Toolkit.
What normally takes 5-7 hours of manual work will take you about 25 to 30 minutes.