On Wednesday, Arm announced another step forward in its IoT ecosystem, expanding its IoT comprehensive solutions product roadmap with two new Arm Cortex M and Cortex A processor-based solutions to simplify and accelerate IoT Core embedded development process.
It is worth noting that in this expanded product roadmap, Arm also introduced the most powerful and most secure Cortex-M processor to date, the Arm Cortex-M85, and extended the Arm virtual hardware to include third-party devices. more platforms, making the opening process simpler and smoother.
Arm is revamping its IoT ecosystem, cementing its own IoT moat to prevent newcomer RISC-V from swallowing more of the IoT market.
For industrial automation scenarios, Cortex-M with performance comparable to Cortex-A is launched
“Since launching the Arm IoT comprehensive solution last October, our team has been working closely with ecosystem partners to share these technologies with developers, OEMs and chip partners. The response has been very good, and we have been receiving some Excellent feedback. But we found that the ecosystem needed more,” said Mohamed Awad, vice president of Arm’s IoT and Embedded business unit, during a technical media briefing on Wednesday.
According to Mohamed Awad, partners demand higher performance, higher security and faster time-to-market, and they need more options, simpler development and safer processing capabilities in order to continue to scale.
In response to these needs, Arm has launched two new IoT solutions as extensions. One is a comprehensive solution for speech recognition using the new Corstone-310, and the other is a comprehensive solution for cloud-native edge devices, both of which are based on the advanced features of the Cortex-M85.
According to Arm, the Cortex-M85 adds enhanced microarchitecture features to improve the performance of scalar computing, an 85% increase in performance compared to the Cortex-M55 and a 30% increase in performance compared to the former performance champion Cortex-M7 . The Cortex-M85 also adds Arm Helium technology to support demanding machine learning use cases such as high-fidelity audio processing without adding a DSP, making it the fastest M-series CPU available for traditional and machine learning workloads. In addition, the Cortex-M85 is also the first Cortex product to integrate the Pointer Authentication and Branch Target Identification (PACBTI) extension from the new Arm-v8.1M architecture.
Notably, the Cortex-M85 is close to the Cortex-A family in performance, but with the convenience, determinism, and low power consumption of an MCU, able to take advantage of the Cortex-M software ecosystem.
However, in the Cortex-M series, the performance and security of the M55 and M7 can already support machine vision, so why introduce the more expensive M85? Mohamed Awad explained that the M7 is more suitable for traditional workloads, the M55 is more suitable for machine learning workloads, and the M85 has both strong traditional computing performance and machine learning workload capabilities, mainly for industrial automation scenarios.
Leifeng.com has learned that processor chips based on Cortex-M85 are expected to be available in 2022.
In addition to MCUs, Arm has also introduced a new Corstone-1000 design to address applications with higher performance requirements such as smart cameras, point-of-sale terminals, robots, and IoT gateways. With Corstone-1000, rich operations such as Linux can be run system.
Consolidate the ecological moat and seize the IoT market with RISC-V
Arm has dominated the mobile communication market for many years, and the market growth is close to the ceiling. In order to seek more room for economic growth, the Internet of Things has become Arm’s key development area.
In recent years, a new CPU instruction set RISC-V, which is open source, streamlined and modular, has emerged, which can provide more cost-effective services for the diversified and fragmented IoT market, thus attracting many chips Manufacturers choose RISC-V from the beginning, or start to try RISC-V and Arm walk on two legs.
In the face of open source, neutral and modular RISC-V, what does Arm use to defend its IoT market?
“‘Ecosystem’ is Arm’s constant commitment. Arm is committed to providing its ecosystem partners with the most efficient path to market and ensuring they can make the most of their software and hardware ecosystem resources.” Mohamed Awad Tell Leifeng.com.
Consolidating its advantages in the ecosystem is the best way for Arm to defend against RISC-V “attacks” at this stage. In addition to the ecosystem Arm has built over the years, the virtual hardware that Arm released six months ago is changing the way software is developed for the IoT, bringing a whole new class of developers into the Arm IoT ecosystem.
According to Mohamed Awad, based on Arm virtual hardware, service providers can achieve scale in the cloud, product design can be free from expensive physical equipment and maintenance, developers can write software for hardware before it is available, and can also Access and extend their software across billions of IoT devices. In addition, in China, ensuring that Arm virtual hardware targets are readily available, and local AI partners can easily access and take advantage of the technology.
Currently, many leading Chinese AI companies are using Arm virtual hardware, including Baidu, Shenzhen Weiai Intelligence, Shanghai Max and Shengjia Technology.
In addition, in order to help developers focus on innovation, Arm has also achieved software utilization and reuse. In addition to Project Centauri, which was launched last October, some of the most popular real-time operating systems, such as FreeRTOS and TencentOS, have recently been updated. Added to the list of available software in CMSIS-Pack format.
RISC-V has not yet established a complete ecosystem in the field of IoT, and Arm is already trying to help the ecosystem break through the boundaries of performance, allowing more developers to join the construction of the Arm ecosystem. In the future, will RISC-V still have the opportunity to seize more of Arm’s market in the IoT market?
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