Arm Grabs Stream for IoT Services

发布时间：2018-06-14 00:00
作者：Ameya360
来源：EE Times
阅读量：1185

Arm acquired Stream Technologies (Glasgow) in an effort to grow a business in paid services for devices on the Internet of Things. The move comes as the IoT is still in an early stage but widely seen to have huge potential with services expected to be one of its hottest sectors.

Stream, a private company founded in 2000, claims that its connectivity management software and services are used by 770,000 devices carrying 2 terabytes of traffic daily. Though mainly focused on cellular, its offerings are network-agnostic, also supporting LoRa and satellite nets carrying IP and non-IP data.

Stream serves a wide variety of applications including asset tracking, smart meters, and the U.K.’s National Rail system. Its services include support for billing and the so-called embedded subscriber identity module (eSIM), a software-based cellular ID. Earlier this year, Arm rolled out software that it called Kigen OS to enable eSIM on its cores.

Arm will integrate Stream’s products into its nascent Mbed IoT services. Arm did not disclose how much it paid for Stream, the size of Stream’s revenues, or the size of its own nascent IoT services business.

The deal is likely one example of how Arm is reaching far beyond the processor core sector that it dominates with encouragement from its new owner, Softbank. Arm already works with IBM to connect IoT deployments to the IBM Watson Cloud and plans other such deals.

“We will build out and monetize cloud services and partner to make an open environment,” said Hima Mukkamala, general manager of Arm’s IoT Cloud Services group.

IoT services are “the carrot that everyone chases,” said Christopher Rommel, vice president of embedded research at market watcher VDC Research Group, Inc.

Although Rommel hadn’t heard of Stream prior to the acquisition, he was bullish on the deal.

“Arm is well-positioned for this with its channel in software and tools. The challenge is walking the line between offering its own services and those of partners. It makes sense for them to go after services, but it’s a complex and crowded space.”

Arm’s effort in IoT software and services started in 2013, when its acquired Sensinode. The startup had software that Arm offered for free as the Mbed OS supporting popular web scripting languages. But users called for better real-time determinism and support for the C language, so Arm reworked Mbed OS around the RTX kernel of Kiel, he said.

Since then, Arm has added various services to its portfolio, planting seeds for an IoT market that’s still in its infancy.

One survey showed that most end users are still 1 to 5 years away from deploying IoT. Source: VDC Research.

The overall IoT market is “not where I would have hoped it would be five years ago … but there are more rollouts and real work happening; the next level is moving beyond experiments,” said Rommel.

“IoT is just beginning to get off the ground,” said Nigel Chadwick, CEO of Stream. “It’s an amazing opportunity going forward.”

“What’s exciting to us is the volume we see from customers … I’m starting to see [deployments] going beyond pilots,” said Mukkamala of Arm. “We sold 100 billion cores in the last 25 years and expect to sell the next 100 billion in the next five years into things like smart meters, where customers want an end-to-end solution.”

（备注：文章来源于网络，信息仅供参考，不代表本网站观点，如有侵权请联系删除！）

上一篇：5G will take some rethinking to scale

下一篇：Fab Tool Spending on Pace for Third Straight Record Year

在线留言询价

相关阅读
AMEYA360:Arm’s Gambit Could Rattle Relationships
Trade news

AMEYA360:Arm’s Gambit Could Rattle Relationships

　　In anticipation of one of the biggest IPOs of the year, Arm is changing its licensing model and developing its own mobile processors — moves that are being contested by some of its biggest customers and device makers and will dramatically shift market dynamics and the supply chain.Arm’s Gambit Could Rattle Relationships.　　Almost all smartphone and tablet vendors currently use Arm-based processors for their devices, purchasing them from Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung, and HiSilicon. Currently Arm collects a licensing fee for each chip manufactured.　　Instead of licensing its technology to semiconductor companies such as Qualcomm and MediaTek, collecting around 1 percent to 2 percent of the chips’ selling price, Arm wants to collect a percentage of the devices’ average retail value. According to some sources, Softbank and Arm are trying to collect a substantial share of the revenues of mobile device vendors.　　Arm’s clout in the mobile market is considerable. Last month, Arm’s owner Softbank released its 2023 financial report highlighting the increase of Arm’s technology adoption across the entire computing ecosystem, including mobile, gaming, automotive, and billions of microcontrollers.　　At the same time, Softbank’s financial report acknowledged that a principal risk to Arm’s business was the “significant concentration” in its customer base. In 2022, 86 percent of its revenue came from the company’s 20 biggest customers, so “the loss of a small number of key customers could significantly impact the group’s growth.”
2023-04-25 11:22 阅读量：1768
ARM Offloads Chinese Joint Venture Stake
Trade news

ARM Offloads Chinese Joint Venture Stake

Drops its involvement in Arm mini China for $775.2 million after the European Union prepare legal proceedingsSoftBank Group, owner of microprocessor IP firm Arm, announced this week that the British firm will sell its majority 51% stake to Chinese investors and ecosystem partners for $775.2 million to form a joint venture for Arm’s business in China. Under the agreement, Arm will still receive a significant proportion of all license, royalty, software, and service revenues arising from Arm China.Arm had already transferred its IP to the joint venture last month, enabling its Chinese operation to enable local chip developers license technology directly in China. This has raised alarm bells within the European Union, with the EU Commissioner for Trade, Cecilia Malmström, launching legal proceedings last week in the World Trade Organization (WTO) against Chinese legislation that undermines the intellectual property rights of European companies.Whether Arm’s hand was forced or not, the company’s rationale for the latest transaction was outlined in SoftBank’s press statement, saying that around 95% of all advanced chips designed in China in 2017 were based on Arm technology, with 20% of the company’s global revenues coming from China in the fiscal year ended March 2018. The statement adds, “The Chinese market is valuable and distinctive from the rest of the world. Arm believes this joint venture, which will license Arm semiconductor technology to Chinese companies and locally develop Arm technology in China, will expand Arm’s opportunities in the Chinese market.”Arm would not comment on the statement, but what the transaction means is that Arm China revenue will no longer be reported under SoftBank’s consolidated accounts once the transaction completes, which it is expected to do this month.The European Union’s Cecilia Malmström said in its case filed on June 1, “Technological innovation and know-how is the bedrock of our knowledge-based economy. It’s what keeps our companies competitive in the global market and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs across Europe. We cannot let any country force our companies to surrender this hard-earned knowledge at its border. This is against international rules that we have all agreed upon in the WTO. If the main players don’t stick to the rulebook, the whole system might collapse.”The EU statement adds that European companies going to China are forced to grant ownership or usage rights of their technology to domestic Chinese entities and are deprived of the ability to freely negotiate market-based terms in technology transfer agreements. This is at odds with the basic rights that companies should be enjoying under the WTO rules and disciplines, particularly under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement).The case initiated by the EU targets specific provisions under the Chinese regulation on import and export of technologies (known as “TIER”) and the regulation on Chinese-foreign equity joint ventures (known as “JV Regulation”) that discriminate against non-Chinese companies and treat them worse than domestic ones. These provisions violate WTO obligations to treat foreign companies on an equal footing with domestic ones and to protect intellectual property like patents and undisclosed business information.The EU says that if the consultations requested do not reach a satisfactory solution within 60 days, the EU will be able to request that WTO sets up a panel to rule on the matter. While the EU’s request is similar to the one brought recently to the WTO by the U.S., it also identifies further potential violations of WTO rules.The U.K.’s Financial Times reports Rene Haas, Arm’s president of its IP group, suggesting that it’s still business as usual, saying, “The partners in China are still using the very same technology they were using prior to the JV being established. If you are a local partner, the biggest change is that you are now operating on a PRC contract as opposed to a U.K. contract.”
2018-06-08 00:00 阅读量：1081
Arm Targets Laptop Performance
Trade news

Arm Targets Laptop Performance

Arm announced a new mobile CPU core that it said can deliver performance within 10% of Intel’s latest Skylake chips. Analysts praised the architecture’s leap forward but said that they doubt Arm will take a significant share of today’s x86-based notebooks.The Cortex-A76 arrives in tandem with new Mali G76 GPU and V76 video cores. All three are expected to appear in premium smartphone SoCs before the end of the year.The A76 marks a full redesign for mobile systems, packing up to 2-Mbytes L2 cache, 4-Mbytes L3, and running at more than 3 GHz in a 7-nm node. It aims to deliver 90% of the Specint2006 performance of an Intel mobile Skylake chip with one-fourth the area and half the power — or roughly the same performance in thermally constrained systems.“We’re looking to close the gap with Intel … this marks the first step in a new family, and it’s the biggest leap we’ve taken in our roadmap,” said Mike Filippo, an Arm fellow and lead architect for the A76.Compared to an A72 core at 10 nm, a 7-nm A76 should deliver 35% more performance or use 40% less power. That’s a step up from 15% to 25% increases that Arm typically delivers with annual core upgrades. In its day, the A72 delivered about 75% of the performance of Intel’s mobile Broadwell processors.The comparisons are based on CPUs running at similar frequencies. Arm acknowledged that Intel’s chips typically support higher frequencies than Arm’s cores. Although TSMC announced a 4-GHz A72 test chip, few SoC makers are expected to push their designs to such extreme speeds.Arm is preparing a separate core for wired servers and networking gear. The A76 aims to expand Arm’s dominance in smartphones into laptops with 4+4 A76/A55 configurations sporting large caches.“We think you’ll see meaningful volumes in laptops,” said Filippo, but some analysts disagree.Arm-based notebooks lack differentiation, said Bob O’Donnell of Technalysis Research. They offer slightly less performance and about the same price as x86 systems. Although the Arm portables sport longer battery life and often build in cellular modems, O’Donnell doubts that those factors will sway many buyers.That said, Asus, Hewlett Packard, and Lenovo announced Arm-based notebooks running Windows 10 on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoC. To date, Qualcomm has been the leading proponent of such designs.With its Cortex-A76, Arm removed performance bottlenecks and optimized features across its mobile core architecture. Click to enlarge. Images: Arm.With its focus on small, low-power cores, Arm will get more benefit from next-generation process technologies than rival Intel, traditionally focused on driving up data rates. Arm claims that the latest 7-nm nodes will only deliver 2% to 3% more speed than the 16-nm node.“There hasn’t been much frequency benefit at all since 16 nm … wire speed hasn’t scaled for some time,” said Peter Greenhalgh, an Arm fellow and vice president of technology.In graphics, the new Mali G76 is the latest high-end implementation of Arm’s Bifrost GPU architecture. It delivers at 7 nm an estimated 50% overall improvement compared to the existing G72 made in a 10-nm process.The G76 can be configured with up to 20 shader cores and an L2 cache configurable from 512 Kbytes to 4 Mbytes. Each shader sports three execution engines.Arm enhanced both the A76 CPU and G76 GPU for machine-learning tasks even though it is about to roll out its first AI-specific cores. The shotgun approach stems in part from Arm’s belief that it’s still early days for what’s likely to be a wide diversity of AI applications needing a variety of implementations.Deep-learning tasks will run four times faster on the A76 and 2.7 times faster on the G76 compared to existing Arm cores. “We are enabling machine learning on everything … as the size of workloads grows, people will move some jobs to GPUs and CPUs for inline work,” said Alex Chalfin, a senior principal graphics architect for Arm.In video, the Mali-V76 improves 4K performance and, running at 800 MHz, can decode a single 8K video stream at 60 frames/second. A next-generation design will support 8K60 encode.The 8K support is initially geared for VR headsets displaying 4K video to each eye. 8K content is not expected to be generally available until 2020, when Japan streams the Summer Olympics in the format.Overall, Arm expects that the A76 will deliver a 35% performance boost over the existing A72 core. Click to enlarge.Overall, “each new core offers significant upgrades for premium smartphones … and Arm’s Dynamiq architecture makes it easier to drop one or two Cortex-A76s into a cluster with the little A55 cores to boost performance in mid-range phones as well,” said Mike Demler, analyst for the Linley Group.“As for the VPU, Arm doesn’t have a display processor core yet to deliver 8K output, but I think there won’t be much of a market for that for a few more years,” he added.Test chips have been taped out for all of the new cores using RTL that Arm shipped about a year ago. Production silicon from SoC customers is eventually expected to span 12-, 7-, and 5-nm nodes.
2018-06-01 00:00 阅读量：1160
ARM Under Attack in AI
Trade news

ARM Under Attack in AI

　　Nearly a dozen processor cores for accelerating machine-learning jobs on clients are racing for spots in SoCs, with some already designed into smartphones. They aim to get a time-to-market advantage over processor-IP giant Arm that is expected to announce its own soon.　　The competition shows that much of the action in machine-learning silicon is shifting to low-power client blocks, according to market watcher Linley Gwennap. However, a race among high-performance chips for the data center is still in its early stages, he told EE Times in a preview of his April 11 keynote for the Linley Processor Conference.　　“Arm has dominated the IP landscape for CPUs and taken over for GPUs as well, but this AI engine creates a whole new market for cores, and other companies are getting a head start,” said Gwennap.　　The new players getting traction include:Apple’s Bionic neural engine in the A11 SoC in its iPhoneThe DeePhi block in Samsung’s Exynos 9810 in the Galaxy S9The neural engine from China’s Cambricon in Huawei’s Kirin 970 handsetThe Cadence P5 for vision and AI acceleration in MediaTek’s P30 SoCPossible use of the Movidius accelerator in Intel’s future PC chip sets　　The existing design wins have locked up many of the sockets in premium smartphones that represent about a third of the overall handset market. Gwennap expects that AI acceleration will filter down to the rest of the handset market over the next two to three years.　　Beyond smartphones, cars are an increasingly large market for AI chips. PCs, tablets, and IoT devices will round out the market.　　To keep pace, Arm announced in February a blanket effort that it calls Project Trillium. But “what they need to be competitive is some specific hardware accelerator to optimize power efficiency,” said Gwennap.　　“Arm is developing that kind of accelerator and plans to release its first product this summer...The fact is that they are behind, which has created an opportunity for the newer companies to jump in.”　　Last October, Arm announced it had formed a machine-learning group. In February, it provided a few details of its plans.　　Arm is likely to provide product details at its annual October eventin Silicon Valley. But there’s no guarantee that Arm will make up lost ground because there’s not necessarily a close tie between neural net engines and CPUs.　　Ultimately, the winning chips in this still-new battle will be the ones with the best combination of performance, power, and die area.　　“The problem is that we see the raw performance, but it really comes down to delivered performance on neural networks, so what we need is a good benchmark like the number of images classified per second,” said Gwennap.　　Baidu was early to release AI benchmarks as open-source, but they have not been widely adopted. The Transaction Processing Council formed a work group late last year to attack the problem, but it has yet to report any progress.　　“It’s easy coming up with benchmark, but hard to get companies to agree and compare results … and things are changing, so any benchmark will have to evolve to stay relevant,” he said.　　So far, Gwennap reports that the multi-core v-MP6000 of Videantishas a slight edge in raw performance over its closest rival, Ceva’s NeuPro, which combines a SIMD DSP with systolic MAC array.　　Other players include Synopsys with its EV64, combining a SIMD DSP with custom logic for activation and pooling. Like Videantis, AImotive’s AIware uses many custom hardware blocks.　　Among low-cost blocks, VeriSilicon’s VIP8000-O delivers the most raw performance using a GPU with up to eight deep-learning engines. Ironically, Cambricon’s CPU with a small matrix engine offers the lowest performance of announced chips, but it still got a significant design win in the Huawei smartphone.　　Imagination is also a player with its PowerVR 2NX, a custom, non-GPU architecture with a MAC array. Nvidia hopes to act as a spoiler, making the IP for the NVDLA core in its Xavier processor free and open-source and winning support from Arm.　　Overall, Gwennap said that as many as 40 companies are now designing customer AI silicon. Many target the data center, where Nvidia’s Volta GPU currently goes largely unchallenged as the training engine of choice by giants including Amazon.　　“The competitors we see now are Google’s TPU and Microsoft’sFPGA-based Brainwave that is being deployed widely, but there’s not a lot of merchant alternatives now,” said Gwennap.　　“Wave Computing seems to be ahead of the pack in bringing a new AI data center architecture to production this year.”　　Wave’s decision to sell full systems suggests that it is targeting second- and third-tier players, not the largest data centers that prefer making their own optimized boxes.　　Intel’s Nervana recently made clear that it will not have production silicon until 2019. Startup Graphcore suggested that it will announce its chip later this year. Another startup, Cerebrus, remains quiet, while bitcoin ASIC maker BitMain announced plans late last year for an AI chip for data centers.　　“There’s a ton of companies working on this kind of stuff,” said Gwennap. “People see this as the next gold rush, and they are all trying to jump in.”
2018-04-11 00:00 阅读量：1108
热门分类
盒子，外壳，机架 电缆，电线 电路保护 连接器，互连器件 开发套件 机电产品 嵌入式解决方案 风扇，热管理 光电元件 其它 无源元件 电源 半导体 传感器，变送器 测试与测量
  • 一周热料
  • 紧缺物料秒杀
型号 品牌 询价
MC33074DR2G onsemi
CDZVT2R20B ROHM Semiconductor
TL431ACLPR Texas Instruments
RB751G-40T2R ROHM Semiconductor
BD71847AMWV-E2 ROHM Semiconductor
型号 品牌 抢购
IPZ40N04S5L4R8ATMA1 Infineon Technologies
STM32F429IGT6 STMicroelectronics
BU33JA2MNVX-CTL ROHM Semiconductor
BP3621 ROHM Semiconductor
ESR03EZPJ151 ROHM Semiconductor
TPS63050YFFR Texas Instruments
热门标签
ROHM
Aavid
Averlogic
开发板
SUSUMU
NXP
PCB
传感器
半导体
原厂授权品牌
更多授权品牌>>
资讯排行榜
  • 周排行榜
  • 月排行榜

相关百科
关于我们
AMEYA360微信服务号 AMEYA360微信服务号
AMEYA360商城(www.ameya360.com)上线于2011年，现 有超过3500家优质供应商，收录600万种产品型号数据，100 多万种元器件库存可供选购，产品覆盖MCU+存储器+电源芯 片+IGBT+MOS管+运放+射频蓝牙+传感器+电阻电容电感+ 连接器等多个领域,平台主营业务涵盖电子元器件现货销售、 BOM配单及提供产品配套资料等，为广大客户提供一站式购 销服务。