ARM has struck another blow at PowerPC, traditionally the dominant processor core in wireless infrastructure but now under pressure as the mobile device CPU reaches out to all kinds of new markets, from servers to base stations to the internet of things. As ARM announced strong results and a new platform for in-car systems, IBM announced that it had licensed a set of five ARM cores to use in communications ASICs.
This is a breakthrough moment for ARM in the communications space, where it has already won deals with another of the central PowerPC gang, Freescale. The former Motorola chip arm, which helped develop the Power architecture, initially adopted the ARM core for low power small cells, but the platform is now expanding into other parts of its range, possibly signalling a complete conversion over time ‘ or at least a hedge against the eventual demise of PowerPC.
IBM has lent more credibility to the theory that, despite the development of multicore platforms like Freescale’s own Layerscape, the market will converge around just two platforms, ARM and x86, with no room left for PowerPC or MIPS. The server giant has licensed the ARM Cortex-A15, A12, A7 and M4 processors, as well as the Mali-450 graphics core. It will use them initially in customer ASICs for routers, switches and base stations, though not, as yet, for its own internal products.
Linley Gwennap, senior analyst at chip research firm Linley Group, said the move made sense as IBM has not updated the PowerPC cores it offers through its custom chip business for some years, so they ‘getting stale, while ARM has become quite popular’. The Cortex/Mali combination is also likely to go into IBM’s set-top box ASICs, he told EETimes. IBM already uses ARM’s Artisan peripheral cores.
Deals like this, outside its traditional mobile device home, will help boost ARM’s growth, as seen in its record third quarter. In the three-month period, it signed 48 new licensing deals, 11 with new customers, helping to boost revenue by 26% year-on-year to $286.7m, with pre-tax profits of about $150m.
Licensing growth “was strong and diverse,” Tom Lantzsch, EVP of strategy at ARM, told EETimes. Overall, 18 of the 48 new licences were for microcontroller-class Cortex-M products, which indicates progress in the company’s stated aim of dominating M2M applications as the ‘internet of things’ evolves. Among ARM’s new customers, memory vendor Spansion licensed the platform for automotive, industrial, and embedded consumer products.
However, this shift to M2M will squeeze royalties ‘ average royalty per chip was flat year-on-year at 4.9 cents. That is why it was important that the high end Cortex-A was the second biggest source of new business, with 15 new licences, including one to Mediatek for the 64-bit ARMv8 processor, the critical weapon in ARM’s bid for the infrastructure chip market and an important future source of margin and revenue growth.
ARM also signed five new licences for the Mali graphics core, one from a new customer; four for Cortex-R and five for Classic ARM (one new). It now has a total of 1,040 licences across its range, with Cortex-M the largest category (outside Classic ARM) with 196 deals, followed by Cortex-A with 158.
To boost its chances in the automotive sector, ARM announced a new microprocessor architecture specifically designed to run real time embedded applications in automotive electronics and industrial control systems. Called ARMv8-R, its stand-out feature is a hardware-assisted virtualization mode which is designed into the real time processor. According to reports, Nvidia is set to be the first licensee as it pushes its mobile processors into the automotive field, relying on its trademark graphics capabilities to drive uptake in increasingly multimedia in-car experiences.
ARM calls the virtualization feature a ‘bare metal’ hypervisor mode, and according to product marketing director Richard York, it addresses the “increasingly sticky problem of combining different software with safety critical applications’, running different OSs, apps and real time tasks on one processor, but with some of them strictly separated for security or performance reasons. So theARMv8-R will run full-blown operating systems like Android to support graphical user interfaces, applications and media services, as well as a real time OS on the same processor. Both virtual memory and protected memory systems can also coexist on one CPU.
Another important element will be the ability to run automotive makers’ own software code, which they use to differentiate their in-car experiences, alongside third party code. Often, safety critical functions, increasingly implemented in software rather than being mechanical, must be run entirely separately from general purpose apps.
The new architecture does not currently support 64-bit as ARM does not see demand for that in the real time world. ARMv8-R will maintain backward compatibility with ARMv7-R ARM and Thumb instruction sets. The company expects ecosystem support to come from various specialized platform projects such as Nucleus from Mentor Graphics and T-Kernel from eSOL, which will create integrated hardware/software solutions to support strict automotive and industrial interoperability and safety standards such as Autostar and ISO 26262.