ARM's Blocking and Business Strategy

Throughout 2010, ARM's open fire against Intel was victorious. Although it is small in scale, it can stop Intel's expansion in consumer electronics, smart phones, and embedded fields. It is also attacking and launching a series of highly-advanced competitive products, and even joint partners in the traditional PC field. - The server is rushing. What is ARM's strength? What kind of bigger actions and designs will follow?

Business model is the biggest advantage "We do processor development is not only for one area, such as Cortex-A15, the first application of some customers use it for mobile phone design, there are customers interested in tablet applications, a variety of situations All of them,” said Wu Xiongang, general manager and vice president of sales for ARM China, said that ARM does not define and divide products according to their application, but builds each business unit by product line.

This kind of product-oriented approach is not difficult to understand for a company that is not a real product. ARM's business model is to license patented technology to semiconductor, software, and OEM partners. Partners can build on the basis of universal licensing technology. The amendments will be paid to ARM authorized usage fees after the market returns. This determines that ARM's livelihood depends entirely on its partners. “To a certain extent, we are working with customers. We succeed when they succeed. Only in this way will the relationship last for a long time.” Wu Xiongang said that ARM focused on building the platform better, and is more conducive to the industry chain customer base. Innovation. For this reason, product orientation seems to be easily challenged to respond to the market reaction is not sensitive enough, in fact, the vast majority of partners are ARM's sensitive antenna.

In the traditional Internet and 2G era, the share of cooperative semiconductor manufacturers makes ARM a dominant player in the mobile phone market, and it also lives in the embedded field relatively moist. However, when it comes to the mobile Internet and 3G era, everything is different. The form of networked terminals has shuffled, and Intel has made great strides into the low-power market. For ARM, low power consumption has always been its specialty, but increasing performance requirements tend to offset this advantage. In the face of such environmental changes, ARM will certainly be abandoned without change.

Not all but the card level "ARM can not be closed, but not necessarily one or two customers will request to do development, to see whether this applies to other customers, there is no specific customer base. And then there is technology Whether it is feasible or not, it is not in line with our goals." Wu Xiongang said that under strong customer-driven, ARM has made a change - on the basis of maintaining traditional advantages began to move toward multi-core, and to use Mali series products Visual computing, providing a complete graphics stack to meet the needs of embedded graphics, 1080p HD display, which is particularly beneficial for consumer device development.

The revolutionary change was the listing of the Cortex-A15 in September 2010. This app is worth mentioning and the processor not only greatly improves the performance, but also can be flexibly adjusted according to different application areas. Judging from current cooperation, more and more partners are using it in smart phones, tablet computers, large-screen displays, digital home entertainment terminals, wireless base stations, and even servers.

With partners as the vanguard, ARM began to expand its broader field, including the expansion into traditional areas such as the TV market. Wu Xiongang believes that: "ARM architecture products are highly competitive in the consumer electronics field. This area requires very high power consumption and cost, and the customization capability is also very demanding. As a result, ARM's partners in consumer electronics and embedded The market has gained advantages in the past and in the present and will continue in the future."

What is particularly noteworthy is that the depth optimization of ARM and Android, as well as the development of the server market, is a sign of significance. In Apple’s business empire, the hardware foundation is the ARM architecture, which is considered to be the most likely Android platform to challenge Apple in the smartphone and tablet market, and to provide more partners with innovative opportunities. "Android was designed for ARM from the very beginning and it is one of the operating systems supported by ARM. Until now, ARM is the only architecture officially supported by Android." Wu Xiongang said, "We have done a lot of optimization work for ARM. Fast and low power consumption on the ARM architecture."

If ARM is seizing the opportunity in the smart phone field and expanding its market share is not surprising, then it will appear to be a bit of a "bizarre" impact on the traditional server market. "There are indeed many customers who promote ARM to be a processor related to server applications. We have also added some corresponding technical features in the Cortex-A15, such as for Web servers and file servers." Wu Xiong analyzed that in the future, not necessarily every category Servers all need strong computing capabilities, and they may be partially biased towards storage and low-power, low-performance applications such as Facebook's business. In the future, our partners are likely to find new opportunities for this part of the server by doing optimization between power consumption, performance, and cost, and make innovations different from the mainstream architecture. We will provide this kind of infrastructure support. ”

Platformization began to refine Although ARM is at the bottom of the core, but it still needs to build a complete ecosystem, but in the past, ARM had been driven by good products, and it was relying more on the natural ecosystem formed by powerful partners. Do layer by layer accumulation above. The best choice for ARM is to use generic products to satisfy and give certain autonomy to partners. However, with the growth of strength, ARM has more and more strength and confidence in building the industrial chain and product segmentation.

According to Wu Xiongang, ARM has invested a lot of resources in China for resource matching. "If Chinese companies do not have the ability to make good use of the ARM architecture and apply global resources, it will be very difficult to compete. We have continued to increase investment in the long term, such as providing on-site support for design services, such as helping customers determine how well the architecture is being implemented. How to realize low power consumption and high performance when realizing..." ARM strengthens the power of Asia Pacific Service Center, not only set up product experts to support the product line, but also set up a software cooperation manager to help Chinese customers to contact international third-party software support. .

ARM China customers gradually mature in practice. Wu Xiongang believes that they have successfully embarked on the road to the advantages of ARM platformization, and such platform accumulation will benefit customers in forming technical resources. “Sometimes the product is not on quantity, not only the product problem, the market may be gone, and the market is changing quickly. After the platform is driven, customers can continue to be equipped with new software and will continue to move forward when the market changes. It's like building a house. After you've covered the first set, you have a foundation."

However, ARM did a lot of efforts and did not feel pressure to reduce. “In the past, customers requested that the processor be released several times a year. We can also step up step by step. But now that the customer's request is more and faster, we feel the pressure is still very large.” Wu Xiongang said.

On behalf of the product Rockchip RK29 series at 2011 CES, Ruixin Micro from China Fuzhou released its RK29 series processor chip solutions and won a lot of attention. Rockchip RK29xx series processors use the ARM Cotex-A8 architecture, clocked at 1.2GHz. Rockchip uses Neone coprocessor and 512KB L2 cache in the chip. Its independent 2D/3D graphics processor supports OpenGL ES 2.0 and Open VG, and supports H. 264, VP8, RV, WMV, AVS, H. 264, MPEG4 and other video formats 1080P video decoding and H. 264 format 1080P video encoding.

Infront Micro IMAPx200

The Inframicro IMAPx200 processor, also from China, is a high-performance multimedia application processor based on the ARM11 core. It integrates several powerful hardware accelerators such as video processing, audio processing, display processing, and scaling. The video accelerator supports high definition 1080P JPEG, MPEG4, H. 263, H. 264, VC1, RV8/9/10, DIVX4/5/6, XVID, and ON2 VP6 decoding and support JPG, MPEG4, H up to SXGA resolution. 263, H. 264 encoding. IMAPx200 uses TSMC65nm low-power CMOS technology, up to 1Ghz.

Freescale i. The MX 6 series Freescale has been promoting its ARM core i over the past year. MX 5 series processor. This year's CES, Freescale introduced a new product: i. MX 6 series processor. One of the four core processor i. The MX 6 Quad has four ARM Cortex A9 cores, each with a frequency of up to 1.2GHz. At the same time, Freescale will also introduce a single-core i. MX 6Solo and dual-core i. MX 6Dual. i. The MX 6Quad ​​processor is capable of coping with 1080P, 60fps video decoding and can perform 1080P, 30fps video encoding.

NVIDIA Tegra 2

This year, Nvidia finally admitted that it is not just a graphics processor manufacturer. In fact, it has long attempted to enter the central processor area and has accumulated experience by developing Tegra processors using the ARM11 core, and has won Tegra 2's recognition in the market. Tegra 2 has 8 processing core units, including 2 Cortex-A9 cores, an ARM 7 core, a 2D/3D graphics core, an HD video encoding core, an HD video decoding core, an image processing core, and an audio processing core.