Interview with ARM: Why is the Internet of Things handled by ARM?

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ARM held the 2014 Technology Forum in Beijing on Wednesday. Sina Mobile took the opportunity to interview Dr. John Heinlein, MD, Vice President of Global Marketing, and Michael Horne, Head of Internet of Things, to discuss issues such as the Internet of Things, Cortex-M series architecture and mbed OS.

Want to copy the hardware mode to the software

When it comes to ARM, ordinary mobile phone users have not heard of it, but mobile phone enthusiasts should have heard it. Its business model is not to sell chips, but to sell technology to semiconductor and software vendors. The low cost, high performance, low power consumption features make the ARM architecture suitable for mobile chips.

Take the current popular MediaTek MT6595 eight-core processor as an example. It has four Cortex-A7 cores and four Cortex-A17 cores. The A8 processor on the iPhone 6 is also based on the ARM V8 architecture. Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 The Krait 400 CPU is also based on secondary development of the ARM architecture.

It can be said that in the mobile processor architecture licensing market, ARM is hard to beat, and cleverly avoids the melee combat between chip vendors.

At the end of September and early October, ARM released the Cortex-M7 processor design and mbed OS free operating system, and hoped to replicate the success of mobile processor architecture design in the Internet of Things (IoT) market.

The mbed OS is a free operating system designed for Cortex-M based hardware, including security, communication transport and device management.

According to Dr. John Heinlein, small and medium-sized hardware manufacturers can register members on the mbed OS official website, get a free operating system, and get ecosystem support from more than 100 OEMs, their foundries, and major chip companies. ARM will then provide marketing cooperation.

“This is a great opportunity for SMEs,” emphasizes Dr. John Heinlein. ARM has done a lot of hard work at the bottom, and companies can focus on product innovation and differentiation, reducing development costs and time to market.

The idea of ​​mbed OS is the same as the number of licensed chip technology licenses, plus the complete ecological chain and experience, ARM is full of confidence in the promotion of mbed OS.

Why is the Internet of Things held by ARM?

Even with the “Golden Partner” of the Cortex-M series architecture and the mbed OS free system, there are many competitors in the market, such as Qualcomm and China Telecom, which have proposed building smart cities more than once, and smart cities are A very important part of networking.

When the author threw the question to Dr. John Heinlein, he immediately excited. "What do you mean by why ARM is right? I have two reasons."

First, ARM can provide a platform across standards. ARM has a long-standing cooperation gene, and has a rich partner and ecological environment.

Second, ARM has cooperation with important communication platforms. In 13 years, ARM acquired Sensinode Oy, which led the development of the 6LoWPAN, a low-cost, low-power device standard.

For Dr. John Heinlein, he is very sensitive to the issue of "why ARM." When answering other questions, he jumped back to the question. "Based on the success of ARM in the A series (mobile chip design), plus compatibility, inertia, this is the third advantage."

“The fourth point is very simple, it is safety,” he added.