Showing posts with label ARM could. Show all posts
CHIPMAKER Intel's Altera unit has unveiled the Stratix 10, a quad-core FPGA that features a 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 with five times the density and twice the performance of Altera's previous generation Stratix V.
The Stratix 10 offers
70 per cent lower power consumption for the same performance and will be
produced on Intel's latest 14nm process technology.
The
device was unveiled by Dan McNamara, corporate vice president and general
manager of the Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) at Intel.
"Stratix
10 combines the benefits of Intel's 14nm tri-gate process technology with a
revolutionary new architecture called HyperFlex to uniquely meet the
performance demands of high-end compute and data-intensive applications ranging
from data centres, network infrastructure, cloud computing and radar and
imaging systems," he said.
The
device is intended for data centre applications and networking infrastructure,
and comes after Intel signed adeal in August with ARM to produce chips based on ARM's
intellectual property in Intel's most advanced chip production facilities.
The
arrangement came after Intel struck a deal in2013 to make 64-bit ARM chips for Altera when it was
designing the Stratix 10.
"FPGAs
are used in the data centre to accelerate the performance of large-scale data
systems. When used as a high-performance, multi-function accelerator in the
data centre, Stratix 10 FPGAs are capable of performing the acceleration and
high-performance networking capabilities," explained McNamara.
The
device is among the first new products that Intel will produce on its own fabs
that incorporate ARM microprocessor technology since offloading the Xscale
business to Marvell in 2006.
Intel
had acquired the Xscale business, then called StrongARM, after buying Digital
Equipment's semiconductor operations in the late 1990s.
Meanwhile,
Intel completed the acquisition ofAltera in December 2015, when CEO BrianKrzanich said: "We will apply Moore's Law to grow today's
FPGA business, and we'll invent new products that make amazing experiences of
the future possible - experiences like autonomous driving and machine
learning."
This
is not the first time that a chip design company has blended memory with
switching fabric. The Xilinx Zynq-7000 is an all-programmable SoC comprising
two 32-bit ARM Cortex-A9 cores, an FPGA and a number of controller cores to
handle Ethernet, USB and other controllers.
Intel-owned
Altera has produced a white paper explaining the technicalintricacies of the Stratix 10. ยต
The Cortex R52 is coming to a robot near you - ARM announces safety-first IoT processor for robots and cars
MICROPROCESSOR
DESIGNER ARM has announced a new chip for real-time safety-critical
applications when humans come into contact with machines.
The
Cortex R-52 has been five years in development and is engineered to meet new
safety standards as ARM takes aim at the growing market of large-scale smart
devices, such as surgical robots and self-driving cars.
Chip
manufacturers see the safety-critical processor as an important growth market
as the IoT moves more into the consumer realm. Intel scooped up Yogitech in
April, an IoT startup focused on boosting the security credentials of chips
used in robots, self-driving cars and other autonomous devices.
The
new ARM chip can switch between tasks 14 times faster than its predecessor, the
Cortex R-5, according to John Ronco, vice president of product marketing at
ARM, who said that the design has already been commercially licensed to
semiconductor firm STMicroelectronics.
Safety-critical
chips are vital in situations where autonomous or semi-autonomous machines
could cause injury or death in the event of a fault or a hack.
Vehicles
are becoming increasingly dependent on software to optimise performance and
make autonomous decisions, but one of the key problems holding back
developments such as driverless cars is concern over how easily they can be
hacked and the consequences of software bugs.
ARM
claimed that the Cortex R-52 "delivers the highest level of integrated
capability for functional safety" of any ARM chip so far.
"Cortex-R52
implements hardware to simplify the integration of increasingly complex
real-time software environments while providing the robust separation of
software necessary to protect safety-critical code," ARM said on its
website.
"As
the first ARMv8-R processor, Cortex-R52 introduces an extra privilege level
which provides support for a hypervisor."
ARM
unveiled the Cortex-A73 processor and Mali G71 CPU in May which it said will
power the majority of virtual reality-ready smartphones in 2017.
Formerly
the UK's biggest technology firm, ARM was recently acquired by Japan's SoftBank
Group for £23.3bn. ฮผ
ARM is beefing up its safety technology for the ARM Cortex-R52, a processor designed for self-driving vehicles.
The
Cambridge, England-based company was recently acquired by Japan’s SoftBank for
$31 billion. And now it is expanding its chip designs to include a processor
with the robust, real-time performance needed for autonomous cars.
The
new chip will simplify the path for certification of automotive applications,
industrial robots, and medical operations. The processor — which ARM will
license to other chip manufacturers — must comply with tough safety standards
such as ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 61508 SIL 3.
It
will enable applications as diverse as surgical automation, safety management
and automotive powertrain control. STMicroelectronics is the first ARM chip
manufacturing partner to announce it has licensed the high-performance
processor to enable it to create highly integrated system-on-chips (SoCs) for
the automotive market.
“If
these systems go wrong in any way, they can affect life,” said Richard York,
worldwide marketing and business development manager at ARM, in an interview
with VentureBeat. “The R-52 will make it much easier to do increasingly complex
software.”
The
Cortex-R52 offers hardware-enforced separation of software tasks to ensure
safety-critical code is fully isolated. So when one part of the system goes
down, it’s easier to decipher what happened. This allows the hardware to be
managed by a software hypervisor policing the execution and resourcing of
tasks. By enabling the precise and robust separation of software, the
Cortex-R52 decreases the amount of code that must be safety-certified, so
speeding up development as software integration, maintenance and validation is
easier. The processor also deals with increased software complexity while
delivering the determinism and fast context switching that real-time systems
demand.
“The
Cortex-R52 supports our Smart Driving vision by enabling a new range of
high-performance, power-efficient SoCs for any in-vehicle application demanding
real-time operation and the highest levels of functional safety, including
powertrain, chassis and ADAS,” said Fabio Marchiรฒ, Automotive & Discrete
group vice president and Automotive Digital Division general manager at
STMicroelectronics, in a statement. “The Cortex-R52’s ability to
compartmentalize software provides our users with the best solution for safety
without loss of determinism. Its virtualization support simplifies the consolidation
of applications and functions into a single processor, delivering a shorter
integration time.”
Denso,
a leading global supplier of advanced automotive technology, is supporting the
launch.The availability of ARM Fast Models and Cycle Models enables software
partners to develop solutions for the processor. They further speed the path to
market as software developers will get access to the Cortex-R52 early in the
design process.
The
Cortex-R52 is 35 percent faster than the previous generation Cortex-R5, which
is already deployed in a range of safety applications. It has achieved a score
of 1.36 Automark/MHz on the EEMBC AutoBench, the highest in its class, using
the Green Hills Compiler 2017.
The
processor has protections against various kinds of random errors, design
errors, and software errors. If it senses a system problem, the processor has
to handle cores such as shutting down a vehicle and bringing it to a safe halt.
So it has to be able to sense, perceive and analyze, make a decision, and acutate
(or execute on that decision).
James
Scobie, product manager for the Cortex-R52, said chips based on the design will
likely be available in 2018.
Intel's second-in-command Venkata Renduchintala is feeling at home with his new company after he switched over from Qualcomm
Venkata Renduchintala is president of Intel's Client and Internet of Things (IoT) businesses and Systems Architecture Group.
Intel is now more than just a PC company. At industry events, the company's keynotes feature drones flying around, robots walking on stage and musicians creating tunes from wearables. The chip maker is helping BMW build an autonomous car, will sell modems to Apple, and is leading the development of next-generation 5G cellular networks. For all these new markets, it will provide chip and data-center technologies.
The transformation is happening partly under the leadership of Venkata Renduchintala, president of the Client and Internet of Things (IoT) Businesses and Systems Architecture Group at Intel. As Intel's second-in-command, he helped cut struggling products like mobile CPUs and sharpened the company's focus on IoT, servers, and connectivity.
Hired from rival Qualcomm late last year, he's an outsider trying to rid Intel of its historical resistance to change. He's also bringing fresh ideas and wholesale changes to Intel, which promises to bring a new dynamic to the Silicon Valley institution.
IDG News Service spoke with him on a range of topics including VR headsets, IoT, autonomous cars, competitors and the decision to cut products. This is an edited version of the discussion.
IDGNS: How have you settled into your new job? What drew you to Intel?
It's been a really interesting process of acclimation. It's a great mixture of feeling, like an organization where I think my experience and my interests can really help the journey [CEO] Brian [Krzanich] wants to undertake with the company. The scale at which Intel can play is probably going to be very difficult for others to match if you look across, client, networking and the data center groups. The goal is to be able to think as one Intel.
IDGNS: There have been questions on how you would fit into Intel, which has a closed culture and history of promoting executives internally. Many people hired from external companies haven't worked out.
One thing that's really important to understand is that Intel is a company of tremendous heritage. I'm not coming in to fix anything. I'm coming in hopefully to add another dimension and an important ingredient to the management team that Brian has at his disposal. It requires me to respect what Intel has been able to achieve and the caliber of the management team and the brands assimilated. I don't think Brian hired me to maintain the status quo. I think what he wanted was a strong ingredient of outside-in thinking complementing the original thoughts. I'm feeling very comfortable now in being able to feel like I've got a good bunch of colleagues who know where I'm coming from; we can speak straight to each other and we can actually have really good discussions of meritocracy.
IDGNS: You had to make some decisions on cutting products Intel has worked on for years as the company's priorities were reset. How tough was it?
When you come into a company you have a degree of objectivity that isn't tainted by your attachments to the genesis of certain projects. For me it was a fairly structured, objective discussion where you make decisions in a transparent and open manner. As long as you can walk people through your thinking, you can take what was very controversial and make it very logical. I'm passionate about technology but I'm also passionate about profitability and how the two are married in a seamlessly reinforcing way.
IDGNS: What's the reasoning behind cutting mobile processors to focus on modems?
First of all, we rationalized what we were spending our R&D on. We had a couple of mobile SoC products that I don't think were worthy to continue to conclusion. That doesn't mean to say we're no longer doing mobile platforms. On the mobile platform side, my commitment is to talk less and do more. When we have something to say we'll talk about it.
On the modem side, it's a fundamental technology and this is where I think it comes down to being as indelible for us as our competence in CPU or GPU. We've set ourselves up with a very interesting road-map, but more importantly, we've established a degree of credibility, relevance and importance as a key technology partner with a number of key players in the industry that I think is really important.
IDGNS: What are your top priorities and goals?
I have three uber-level goals. One is to continue to drive our client computing business to a position of stable profitability in the face of a slowly declining [market]. I think we're doing well in that area. The second is to grow and scale our IoT business from something that's very interesting to something that's really substantial in the longer term. The IoT business for us is a microcosm of the entire company coming together -- we're creating a type of all-for-one, one-for-all mentality. The third is to maintain a degree of vibrancy in the technology leadership of our entire systems architecture organization. It's developing all the core technologies that really moves the competitive needle forward.
IDGNS: Intel's untethered mixed-reality headset called Project Alloy was big news at IDF. What are the expectations from Alloy and how are things going?
The whole point of having tetherless VR is a big deal. Everything we're doing in Alloy we're going to open-source. We can take VR and evolve it from the very rudimentary definitions today of [VR] in a smart phone that you clip into some kind of visor. You can move it to a capable, embedded PC that's driving two to three teraflops of computing and generate a really immersive experience. That was really it -- taking ideas out from the lab, productizing them, solving all those problems of integration, figuring out how RealSense and depth camera fits into all of that, figuring out how to do merged reality, and saying "now go scale the ecosystem."
IDGNS: Is the VR headset the new PC?
I think it's another very interesting growth opportunity for the PC. I think it can generate a specific class of products in its own right. It will generate different segmentation points and probably a custom piece of silicon built on the PC platform that amplify the use case. So we're very excited about the whole VR space.
IDGNS: Intel hasn't given up on Moore's Law, though many believe it is reaching its end. How is Intel preparing for a future when manufacturing reaches atomic scale, and how will chips look beyond Kaby Lake?
Nobody inside Intel is coming anywhere near the kind-of-like fatalistic conclusions about where Moore's Law is. Intel has had a stellar track record in delivering node generation like clockwork. Maybe we've moved from a two-year to a two-and-a-half-year cadence, but we already see light at the end of the tunnel. We will continue to drive process technology and nobody is calling timeout on anything. We're working hard on 7-nanometer, we're talking about pathfinding for 5-nanometer. All of that is in the throes. We made a great announcement on Kaby Lake -- that's using an evolution of 14-nanometer transistor geometry that gave a substantially improved user experience compared to Skylake. We're going to continue to do more of that as we continue to drive process leadership.
IDGNS: Are you happy with your current chip line-up -- Kaby Lake for PCs, and Atom for IoT?
We have a competent portfolio of products. I'm in no way shape or form concluding they are complete and aren't going to be benefited from augmentation. For me I think it's really wanting to understand the use cases a lot more. I don't see an IoT strategy for Intel being one where everything is delivered by Intel. It's integrating a number of different technologies that could be indigenous to Intel, or could be created by other companies, but managed in a way where people could look at Intel as somebody providing the overarching framework of integration.
IDGNS: IoT is a big part of Intel's future. What's the strategy for that market?
That's a significant business. I think we're just starting. As you see the advent of autonomous driving vehicles, you see robots and drones start to ship in scale: those are very high value opportunities for us. We characterize our IoT interests into three verticals: industrial, transportation and retail -- all of them have an end-to-end dimension where we're providing a client environment, the networking infrastructure and the data analytics platform that drives all of that through industry partnerships.
IDGNS: Would in any way the ARM foundry deal help Intel achieve its goals in IoT and other areas? Would you be open to the idea of taking an ARM CPU license, as an example?
Open to? Yes. My view is fairly straightforward -- that Intel's IoT plan has to not only be able to harmoniously integrate Intel-based microprocessors and MCUs, it has to be able to aggregate and harmoniously integrate a plethora of different types of MCUs, whether it be ARM-based, MIPS-based, or proprietary MCUs. All of them have the ability to monitor, sense data that they want to get on to an information highway of some kind. Our ability to [support] many different client environments is going to be a necessity in any vertical IoT strategy we have. There are many areas in the ARM ecosystem where Intel can pragmatically play in for its own benefit. I'm a big believer in paying respect to established ecosystems.
IDGNS: Self-driving cars are a big deal for Intel. Could you talk about projects in the pipeline?
Our goal is to provide the type of computing power that dwarfs anything that exists in a car today, but basically make it mainstream. What we're doing on our Xeon Phi processor for machine learning and deep learning, what we're doing in computer vision and also supplemented by radar and lidar. Being able to aggregate that data, generate intelligence, make decisions on it with assistance from machine and deep learning algorithms -- that's all happening as we speak.
IDGNS: How do you see the autonomous car market evolving?
I see the first explosive area to be in the urban transportation environment where services like Uber and Lyft will evolve and develop. There's going to be a lot of experimentation and path-finding to do in addition to technology creation. We're probably talking about a decade away. Stamina to invest is going to be really important; those that have the stamina to stay the course are going to win big.
IDGNS: Nvidia is approaching the automotive markets aggressively with its GPUs, how will you compete?
I have a great deal of respect for Nvidia. But every time I think of Nvidia, I think about Californian wine where they can make great wine but it contains only one grape -- great Cabernet Sauvignon or a great Chardonnay. I love French wines and French wines are blends where you need to be great at growing Cabernet, great at growing Merlot, great at growing Cabernet Franc. The art is in the mixture. That's the benefit Intel has. We have GPU, we have CPU, we have custom silicon, we have embedded storage, we have FPGA. Nvidia's going to basically say "I've got GPUs and I've got GPUs and I've got GPUs." Great strategy, but it doesn't give anywhere near the extensibility, flexibility and scalability that Intel is able to offer.
IDGNS: How will 5G influence changes in the way devices are made and work?
5G is as much about the transformation of the network and the infrastructure as it is the client environment. [There is] going to be an even greater demand from mobile broadband bandwidth, people are going to want tens of gigabytes per second, if not hundreds of gigabytes per second. We're going to see much greater pervasiveness of client devices. If you talk about autonomous vehicles or delivering health services over a mobile network, you need to be able to make life or death decisions based on that. The network has to transform and the data center becomes a much higher order entity that's focused on massive data analytics that orchestrates that entire network.
The transformation is happening partly under the leadership of Venkata Renduchintala, president of the Client and Internet of Things (IoT) Businesses and Systems Architecture Group at Intel. As Intel's second-in-command, he helped cut struggling products like mobile CPUs and sharpened the company's focus on IoT, servers, and connectivity.
Hired from rival Qualcomm late last year, he's an outsider trying to rid Intel of its historical resistance to change. He's also bringing fresh ideas and wholesale changes to Intel, which promises to bring a new dynamic to the Silicon Valley institution.
IDG News Service spoke with him on a range of topics including VR headsets, IoT, autonomous cars, competitors and the decision to cut products. This is an edited version of the discussion.
IDGNS: How have you settled into your new job? What drew you to Intel?
It's been a really interesting process of acclimation. It's a great mixture of feeling, like an organization where I think my experience and my interests can really help the journey [CEO] Brian [Krzanich] wants to undertake with the company. The scale at which Intel can play is probably going to be very difficult for others to match if you look across, client, networking and the data center groups. The goal is to be able to think as one Intel.
IDGNS: There have been questions on how you would fit into Intel, which has a closed culture and history of promoting executives internally. Many people hired from external companies haven't worked out.
One thing that's really important to understand is that Intel is a company of tremendous heritage. I'm not coming in to fix anything. I'm coming in hopefully to add another dimension and an important ingredient to the management team that Brian has at his disposal. It requires me to respect what Intel has been able to achieve and the caliber of the management team and the brands assimilated. I don't think Brian hired me to maintain the status quo. I think what he wanted was a strong ingredient of outside-in thinking complementing the original thoughts. I'm feeling very comfortable now in being able to feel like I've got a good bunch of colleagues who know where I'm coming from; we can speak straight to each other and we can actually have really good discussions of meritocracy.
IDGNS: You had to make some decisions on cutting products Intel has worked on for years as the company's priorities were reset. How tough was it?
When you come into a company you have a degree of objectivity that isn't tainted by your attachments to the genesis of certain projects. For me it was a fairly structured, objective discussion where you make decisions in a transparent and open manner. As long as you can walk people through your thinking, you can take what was very controversial and make it very logical. I'm passionate about technology but I'm also passionate about profitability and how the two are married in a seamlessly reinforcing way.
IDGNS: What's the reasoning behind cutting mobile processors to focus on modems?
First of all, we rationalized what we were spending our R&D on. We had a couple of mobile SoC products that I don't think were worthy to continue to conclusion. That doesn't mean to say we're no longer doing mobile platforms. On the mobile platform side, my commitment is to talk less and do more. When we have something to say we'll talk about it.
On the modem side, it's a fundamental technology and this is where I think it comes down to being as indelible for us as our competence in CPU or GPU. We've set ourselves up with a very interesting road-map, but more importantly, we've established a degree of credibility, relevance and importance as a key technology partner with a number of key players in the industry that I think is really important.
IDGNS: What are your top priorities and goals?
I have three uber-level goals. One is to continue to drive our client computing business to a position of stable profitability in the face of a slowly declining [market]. I think we're doing well in that area. The second is to grow and scale our IoT business from something that's very interesting to something that's really substantial in the longer term. The IoT business for us is a microcosm of the entire company coming together -- we're creating a type of all-for-one, one-for-all mentality. The third is to maintain a degree of vibrancy in the technology leadership of our entire systems architecture organization. It's developing all the core technologies that really moves the competitive needle forward.
IDGNS: Intel's untethered mixed-reality headset called Project Alloy was big news at IDF. What are the expectations from Alloy and how are things going?
The whole point of having tetherless VR is a big deal. Everything we're doing in Alloy we're going to open-source. We can take VR and evolve it from the very rudimentary definitions today of [VR] in a smart phone that you clip into some kind of visor. You can move it to a capable, embedded PC that's driving two to three teraflops of computing and generate a really immersive experience. That was really it -- taking ideas out from the lab, productizing them, solving all those problems of integration, figuring out how RealSense and depth camera fits into all of that, figuring out how to do merged reality, and saying "now go scale the ecosystem."
IDGNS: Is the VR headset the new PC?
I think it's another very interesting growth opportunity for the PC. I think it can generate a specific class of products in its own right. It will generate different segmentation points and probably a custom piece of silicon built on the PC platform that amplify the use case. So we're very excited about the whole VR space.
IDGNS: Intel hasn't given up on Moore's Law, though many believe it is reaching its end. How is Intel preparing for a future when manufacturing reaches atomic scale, and how will chips look beyond Kaby Lake?
Nobody inside Intel is coming anywhere near the kind-of-like fatalistic conclusions about where Moore's Law is. Intel has had a stellar track record in delivering node generation like clockwork. Maybe we've moved from a two-year to a two-and-a-half-year cadence, but we already see light at the end of the tunnel. We will continue to drive process technology and nobody is calling timeout on anything. We're working hard on 7-nanometer, we're talking about pathfinding for 5-nanometer. All of that is in the throes. We made a great announcement on Kaby Lake -- that's using an evolution of 14-nanometer transistor geometry that gave a substantially improved user experience compared to Skylake. We're going to continue to do more of that as we continue to drive process leadership.
IDGNS: Are you happy with your current chip line-up -- Kaby Lake for PCs, and Atom for IoT?
We have a competent portfolio of products. I'm in no way shape or form concluding they are complete and aren't going to be benefited from augmentation. For me I think it's really wanting to understand the use cases a lot more. I don't see an IoT strategy for Intel being one where everything is delivered by Intel. It's integrating a number of different technologies that could be indigenous to Intel, or could be created by other companies, but managed in a way where people could look at Intel as somebody providing the overarching framework of integration.
IDGNS: IoT is a big part of Intel's future. What's the strategy for that market?
That's a significant business. I think we're just starting. As you see the advent of autonomous driving vehicles, you see robots and drones start to ship in scale: those are very high value opportunities for us. We characterize our IoT interests into three verticals: industrial, transportation and retail -- all of them have an end-to-end dimension where we're providing a client environment, the networking infrastructure and the data analytics platform that drives all of that through industry partnerships.
IDGNS: Would in any way the ARM foundry deal help Intel achieve its goals in IoT and other areas? Would you be open to the idea of taking an ARM CPU license, as an example?
Open to? Yes. My view is fairly straightforward -- that Intel's IoT plan has to not only be able to harmoniously integrate Intel-based microprocessors and MCUs, it has to be able to aggregate and harmoniously integrate a plethora of different types of MCUs, whether it be ARM-based, MIPS-based, or proprietary MCUs. All of them have the ability to monitor, sense data that they want to get on to an information highway of some kind. Our ability to [support] many different client environments is going to be a necessity in any vertical IoT strategy we have. There are many areas in the ARM ecosystem where Intel can pragmatically play in for its own benefit. I'm a big believer in paying respect to established ecosystems.
IDGNS: Self-driving cars are a big deal for Intel. Could you talk about projects in the pipeline?
Our goal is to provide the type of computing power that dwarfs anything that exists in a car today, but basically make it mainstream. What we're doing on our Xeon Phi processor for machine learning and deep learning, what we're doing in computer vision and also supplemented by radar and lidar. Being able to aggregate that data, generate intelligence, make decisions on it with assistance from machine and deep learning algorithms -- that's all happening as we speak.
IDGNS: How do you see the autonomous car market evolving?
I see the first explosive area to be in the urban transportation environment where services like Uber and Lyft will evolve and develop. There's going to be a lot of experimentation and path-finding to do in addition to technology creation. We're probably talking about a decade away. Stamina to invest is going to be really important; those that have the stamina to stay the course are going to win big.
IDGNS: Nvidia is approaching the automotive markets aggressively with its GPUs, how will you compete?
I have a great deal of respect for Nvidia. But every time I think of Nvidia, I think about Californian wine where they can make great wine but it contains only one grape -- great Cabernet Sauvignon or a great Chardonnay. I love French wines and French wines are blends where you need to be great at growing Cabernet, great at growing Merlot, great at growing Cabernet Franc. The art is in the mixture. That's the benefit Intel has. We have GPU, we have CPU, we have custom silicon, we have embedded storage, we have FPGA. Nvidia's going to basically say "I've got GPUs and I've got GPUs and I've got GPUs." Great strategy, but it doesn't give anywhere near the extensibility, flexibility and scalability that Intel is able to offer.
IDGNS: How will 5G influence changes in the way devices are made and work?
5G is as much about the transformation of the network and the infrastructure as it is the client environment. [There is] going to be an even greater demand from mobile broadband bandwidth, people are going to want tens of gigabytes per second, if not hundreds of gigabytes per second. We're going to see much greater pervasiveness of client devices. If you talk about autonomous vehicles or delivering health services over a mobile network, you need to be able to make life or death decisions based on that. The network has to transform and the data center becomes a much higher order entity that's focused on massive data analytics that orchestrates that entire network.
LG
Electronics Inc unveiled a premium smartphone on Wednesday that the South
Korean firm hopes will help revive its money-losing mobile business, a major
revenue contributor and key customer for components suppliers in the LG group.
LG
announced its V20 just hours before rival Apple Inc is due to launch its latest
iPhone. The V20 also comes about five months after LG launched its flagship G5,
which fell short of expectations due to production problems and competition
from Samsung Electronics Co Ltd's Galaxy S7 phones.
The
G5's disappointing performance pushed LG's mobile arm to its fifth consecutive
quarterly operating loss in April-June. The division made up almost a quarter
of LG's first-half revenue and buys parts from affiliates such as LG Display Co
Ltd and LG Innotek Co Ltd.
"We
hope the V20 will be a turning point," LG mobile division chief Cho Juno
said at a news conference.
LG's
new phone will face tough competition from Apple and Samsung, though the
latter's recall of the newly launched Galaxy Note 7 may work in LG's favor.
Cho
said he was not sure whether the Note 7 recall would help the V20, but would
not comment further on any competition including Samsung and Apple.
The
V20 offers a 5.7 inch display, metal body, replaceable battery and beefed-up
audio capabilities with new chipsets and through a partnership with audio
equipment maker Bang & Olufsen A/S.
It
also has improved photo and video capabilities through features such as dual
rear cameras and reduced blurring on pictures and videos, LG said.
LG
did not disclose pricing or sales targets. It said it would start selling the
phone in South Korea at the end of September, followed at undisclosed times by
markets such as the United States, Hong Kong and China.
ARM Holdings is little known out of the tech and financial world – however, the UK-based company is known well enough by Japanese’s SoftBank Group for them to pay $32 billion to acquire the firm – an acquisition that is now complete.
SoftBank Group seems very excited for the future in their press release. The
SoftBank Group is into more than mobile wireless communication, and ARM is the
leading semiconductor-based architecture for the digital world – however,
working together in the future they can accomplish great things as 5G comes
into play, as well as the Internet-of-Things (IoT), continues to grow.
If
SoftBank sounds familiar to you, it may because back in 2013 they also
purchased a 72-percent stake in US-based Sprint. That relationship has been a
rocky one due to its inability to compete with T-Mobile. Sprint is still hoping
to build up their infrastructure, along with incentives and promos encouraging
new customers to join the carrier. ARM does not actually produce any chips –
they design and license their technology to the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung,
MediaTek, and more. ARM-based chips are primarily used in smartphones and
tablets but are also used in robotics, and IoT products. While Intel used to
dominate the laptop market, ARM-based chips are used in the Chromebook laptops,
which are starting to grow in popularity.
The
SoftBank Group has made it clear that ARM will operate independently, only work
together to have a far better future. They explained that every day all their
ARM partners ship more than 40 million ARM-based chips around the world.
SoftBank, itself, provides mobile and fixed-line connectivity to over 100
million people and devices in both the US and Japan. SoftBank believes that
working together ARM will be able to design new architecture at a faster rate
to help keep up with the increasing demands of mobile wireless technology. The
future is moving fast, and the SoftBank Group plans to be a part of that
revolution – what better partner to take on than ARM. Both companies are
expected to be a part of robotics, supercomputers, 5G networks, and the IoT,
which is rapidly becoming a multi-billion dollar business. Who wouldn’t want a
smart home – lights go on and off, lock or unlock your door, monitor you home
for burglars or your own kids, adjust the thermostat, see what is in your
refrigerator while at the store – these products and more are coming soon. With
the purchase of ARM, SoftBank just helped to ensure that they will be a part of
the future..
Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology will be used in the Post-K supercomputer being built by Fujitsu.
ARM has upped the supercomputer ante against rivals IBM, Intel and Nvidia with the announcement of Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology.
ARM has upped the supercomputer ante against rivals IBM, Intel and Nvidia with the announcement of Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology.
Developed
for the ARMv8-A architecture, the SVE technology is already set to be used for
the Post-K supercomputer being built by Fujitsu for the RIKEN Advanced Institute
for Computational Science in Japan.
Unveiled
at the Hot Chips conference in the US, the technology supports vectors from
128-bit to 2048-bit. Shifting the vector calculation problem from software to
hardware, SVE technology will be a scalable extension to the ARM instruction
set.
Vector
processors drove early supercomputers, but were then replaced by less expensive
IBM RISC chips in the early 1990s. In today’s high-performance servers x86
processors are used, but this could be set to shift with the industry seeing a
renewed reliance on vector processing.
The
move my ARM to introduce this alternative chip architecture is a sign of the
company’s plans to move deeper into the server, data centre and
high-performance computing (HPC) space while offering something different to
rivals.
The
new chip design could soon be running the world’s most powerful supercomputer
if the plans for the Post-K supercomputer comes to fruition. Fujitsu chose ARM
in July 2016 for the supercomputer, shifting from the 2GHz Sun Sparc64 cores
used in the K supercomputer. If the build goes smoothly, the new supercomputer
could be capable of 1,000 petaflops.
The
announcement at Hot Chips follows the recent acquisition of the UK chip maker
by Japanese company SoftBank. With the price set at $32 billion, the acquisition
hopes to sharpen ARM’s focus in the server and internet of things space.
ARM's new supercomputer chip design with vector extensions will be in Japan's Post-K computer, which will be deployed in 2020
ARM
conquered the mobile market starting with Apple’s iPhone, and now wants to be
in the world’s fastest computers.
A
new ARM chip design being announced on Monday is targeted at supercomputers, a
lucrative market in which the company has no presence. ARM’s new chip design,
which has mobile origins, has extensions and tweaks to boost computing power.
The
announcement comes a few weeks after Japanese company Softbank said it would
buy ARM for a mammoth $32 billion. With the cash, ARM is expected to sharpen
its focus on servers and the internet of things.
ARM’s
new chip design will help the company on two fronts. ARM is sending a warning
to Intel, IBM and other chip makers that it too can develop fast supercomputing
chips. The company will also join a race among countries and chip makers to
build the world’s fastest computers.
The
chip design is being detailed at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino,
California, on Monday.
Countries
like the U.S., Japan and China want to
be the first to reach the exascale computing threshold, in which a
supercomputer delivers 1 exaflop of performance (a million trillion
calculations per second). Intel, IBM and Nvidia have also been pushing the
limits of chip performance to reach that goal.
Following
Softbank’s agreement to buy ARM, it should come as no surprise that the first
supercomputer based on the new chip design will be installed in Japan. The
Post-K supercomputer will be developed by Fujitsu, which dropped a bombshell in
June when it dropped its trusty SPARC architecture in favor of ARM for
high-performance computers. Fujitsu aided ARM in the development of the new
chip.
Post-K
will be 50 to 100 times speedier than its predecessor, the K Computer, which is
currently the fifth fastest computer in the world. The K Computer delivers 10.5
petaflops of peak performance with the Fujitsu-designed SPARC64 VIIIfx
processor.
The
new ARM processor design will be based on the 64-bit ARM-v8A architecture and
have vector processing extensions called Scalable Vector Extension. Vector
processors drove early supercomputers, which then shifted over to less
expensive IBM RISC chips in the early 1990s, and on to general-purpose x86
processors, which are in most high-performance servers today.
In
2013, researchers said less expensive smartphone chips, like the ones from ARM,
would ultimately replace x86 processors in supercomputers. But history has
turned, and the growing reliance on vector processing is seeing a resurgence
with ARM’s new chip design and Intel’s Xeon Phi supercomputing chip.
The
power-efficient chip design from ARM could crank up performance while reducing
power consumption. Supercomputing speed is growing at a phenomenal rate, but
the power consumption isn’t coming down as quickly.
ARM’s
chip design will also be part of an influx of alternative chip architectures
outside x86 and IBM’s Power entering supercomputing. The world’s fastest
supercomputer called the Sunway TaihuLight has a homegrown ShenWei processor
developed by China. It offers peak performance of 125.4 petaflops.
ARM
has struggled in servers for half a decade now, and the new chip design could
give it a better chance of competing against Intel, which dominates data
centers. Large server clusters are being built for machine learning, which
could use the low-precision calculations provided by a large congregation of ARM
chips with vector extensions.
ARM
servers are already available, but aren’t being widely adopted. Dell and Lenovo
are testing ARM servers, and said they would ship products when demand grows,
which hasn’t happened yet.
ARM
server chip makers are also struggling and hanging on with the hope the market
will take off someday. AMD, which once placed its server future on ARM chips,
has reverted back to x86 chips as it re-enters servers. Qualcomm is testing its
ARM server chip with cloud developers, and won’t release a chip until the
market is viable. AppliedMicro scored a big win with Hewlett Packard
Enterprise, which is using the ARM server chips in storage systems. Other ARM
server chip makers include Broadcom and Cavium. (Know More)
