News & Reviews:   ARM

The HUAWEI Ban was signed in May 2019 declaring a national security risk emergency that banned U.S. companies from using telecommunications equipment made by Chinese firms has not come to an end yet. President Donald Trump has just announced another year of extension on the ban until May 2021.

It seems that China could be planning to utilize robot arms to perform various medical tasks on COVID-19 patients that could put doctors at risk if done in person. The aforementioned robot arms have cameras built-in and it can be controlled by an operator even if they are not located in the same city as the patient.

Things are seemingly grim for Huawei. Ever since Google announced that it will stop its services for Huawei, Qualcomm and Intel will also cut ties with them. But all is not lost, as of recent news, not everyone is on the same page with the US Government. This includes TSMC, Panasonic, Aptoide, and an official statement by Huawei CEO, Ren Zhengfei on the future of Huawei.

According to the BBC, ARM Holdings, designers of nearly all the smartphone chipsets and processors in the world recently sent out a memo to stop "all active contracts, support entitlements, and any pending engagements” with Huawei due to the US blacklisting. While ARM is a UK-based company owned by Japan-based SoftBank, it purportedly uses “US origin technology” in their designs which are also used in Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin chipsets. While this means that we could see less Huawei Kirin chipsets in the future, it isn’t all as grim or “insurmountable” as some may believe.

We are still in 2016, and the rumours for next year’s Samsung Galaxy S8 is already out. It has been reported that the next flagship from the Korean company will be using the in-house Exynos 8895, featuring the new Mali-G71 GPU from ARM.

Softbank, one of the world’s largest telecommunication conglomerate, just announced that they will agree to invest in ARM for USD 32 billion (~RM 127 billion). Just as a recap, ARM is the company that creates the basic chip building blocks for just about every mobile chipmaker out there.

In a move that doesn't surprise anyone, TSMC and GlobalFoundries, two of the world's leading semiconductor foundries (they make chips) are looking to begin development on a 20nm chip for next generation ARM based mobile processors. The advantage of doing so includes:

• 30% faster clock speed
• 1.9 times better density
• 25% less power consumption

Intel seems to finally understand that releasing a new chip or two every year isn't going to let it break into the mobile market. There are many ARM-based competitors already offering much better alternatives such as Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei, Apple, TSMC, NVIDIA and many more. New players emerging from China such as MediaTek are also offering equal if not better performance processors at much cheaper price points. New Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has had this to say about it:

We see that Atom is now at the same importance, it's launching on the same leading edge technology, sometimes even coming before Core," says Krzanich.

I think you'll start to see stuff with our silicon toward the end of the year and the beginning of next year," We're trying to get our silicon into some of them, create some ourselves, understand the usage and create an ecosystem."-Brian Krzanich, CEO, Intel

Diversifying their server offerings, AMD have released their first ARM-based Server processor under the codename 'Seattle'. Utilizing ARM Cortex A57 core design, the first Seattle processors will offer an 8-core processor with plans for a 16-core processor in the future. It should be available in Q2 of 2014. Tech specs for the Seattle processor include:

• 2GHz
• Freedom Fabric Technology
• Supports up to 128GB DRAM
• extensive offload engines ~ better power efficiency and reduced CPU loading
• Server Caliber encryption and compression
• Legacy networking including integrated 10GbE

Most of the smartphones and tablets in the market are running on ARM-based processors such as those from Qualcomm and Samsung, especially the Android systems, Intel is making big steps to try and break into the mobile market. One of the most major of which is their new Atom microarcitecture called Silvermont. While there are already a number of Intel powered smartphones and tablets (Lenovo K900, Asus FonePad, etc.), they hardly compare to the hordes of ARM based smartphones and tablets already in and coming to the market. ARM is already coming out with a number of new processors targeting both the midrange and the high performance markets so there is a lot riding on the success of Intel's Silvermont.