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ARM Seeing Growth
ARM and Vivante have achieved significant market share gains in the system-on-chip (SoC) GPU market while Imagination and Qualcomm have seen their market shares fall.
ARM has been aggressively pushing its Mali GPU design for the last two years, while Vivante has ridden the surge in Chinese tablet sales, and these factors have resulted in both firms increasing market shares. Analyst outfit Jon Peddie Research claimed that ARM and Vivante scored first half 2012 SoC GPU market shares of 12.9 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively, while the SoC GPU market share leaders Imagination and Qualcomm both suffered declines.
ARM more than doubled its market share from the same period a year ago while Vivante went even better by almost quadrupling its market share. Not only were both firms claiming large pieces of the pie, Jon Peddie Research claimed the SoC GPU market had increased by 91.3 percent, suggesting that Qualcomm and Imagination are having a harder time getting new business. Jon Peddie told The INQUIRER that new vendors are entering the market, typically with lower prices to earn customers.
Nvidia’s SoC GPU operations accounted for 2.5 percent of the total smartphone and tablet market, which given that the firm doesn’t license out its GPU designs is pretty impressive. Nvidia could see its market share increase if Microsoft’s Surface tablet sells well.
Will ARM Get OpenCL Certification?
ARM has submitted its Mali-T604 GPU for OpenCL certification.
ARM’s Mali GPUs have so far shyed away from GPGPU support, however as smartphones and tablets are not expected to see an ever growing number of processor cores the cries for OpenCL support in its GPUs have been growing louder. Now ARM has submitted its Mali-T604 GPU to the Khronos consortium for full profile OpenCL certification.
The Khronos consortium oversees the development of OpenCL and the high-level language is supported by a number of firms including AMD, Nvidia and Intel on their latest GPUs. However until now there hasn’t been an OpenCL certified GPU that is used in smartphones, though firms such as Zii Labs also boast OpenCL support for their chips.
ARM said, “Building on a scalable multicore, multi-pipeline architecture design, the Mali-T600 Series GPU includes a number of advanced features. In particular, native scalar and vector operations for OpenCL’s integer and floating point data types (including 64-bit); support for static and dynamic compilation; hardware accelerated image and sampler data types; fast atomic operations and compliance to IEEE754-2008 precision requirements.
ARM Profits On The Rise
ARM has reported good second quarter financial results, with profit rising by 23 per cent to $102.97 million.
ARM has been riding high in the public consciousness thanks to firms such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia pushing its chip architecture into smartphones and tablets. The firm announced it managed to take in $209.78 millio in revenue during the second quarter, a 15 per cent increase from the same period last year, while net income rose even faster by 23 per cent to $102.97 million.
ARM said two billion chips using the firm’s various design models were shipped during the quarter, which represented a nine per cent increase from last year. The firm revealed that its core money making operation, processor royalties, rose by 14 per cent.
Warren East, CEO of ARM said, “ARM’s royalty revenues continued to outperform the overall semiconductor industry as our customers gained market share within existing markets and launched products which are taking ARM technology into new markets.
“This quarter we have seen multiple market leaders announce exciting new products including computers and servers from Dell and Microsoft, and embedded applications from Freescale and Toshiba. In addition, ARM and TSMC announced a partnership to optimise next generation ARM processors and physical IP and TSMC’s FinFET process technology.”
Is Samsung Pursuing The Server Market?
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It is certain that Korean electronics giant Samsung will soon be entering the server chip market.
Reports are coming in that the company has been picking up key server personnel from Intel and AMD. Samsung has been focused on developing ARM chips and stayed clear of the x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD.
But the companies latest hires seem to indicate that might change.
Samsung’s latest recruits include veterans of the chip business like Jim Mergard, Frank Helms, who is a Fusion APU architect, Brad Burgess who designed the Bobcat APU and Patrick Patla (VP of AMD’s server business). Patla was behind the success of the Opteron chip set and has done well using the x86-server system.
Will Cortex A7 Accelerate Android?
Texas Instruments (TI) said ARM’s heterogeneous ‘Big.little’ architecture helps it accelerate Google’s Android operating system.
TI, which designs the popular range of OMAP system-on-chip (SoC) processors found in many smartphones told The INQUIRER that ARM’s newly unveiled Big.little architecture will help improve overall performance of the Android operating system.
Avner Goren, GM of OMAP Strategy at TI told The INQUIRER that ARM’s Big.little architecture, which uses Cortex A7 and Cortex A15 cores, addresses a different need than that of multi-core processors made up of identical cores.
Goren said, “We have been using heterogeneous multi-cores since 2002, we always had an ARM CPU coupled to accelerators for video, graphics, DSPs, image processing. This [Big.little] doesn’t change anything in this idea. On the contrary, it builds on this concept and it is another dimension. None of what was held here changes what we are doing in the rest of the system.”
Goren continued by saying that Big.little is a natural progression from the multi-core, accelerator-aided processors of yesteryear. “What we have held today doesn’t change the fact I would continue doing accelerators, DSPs, video accelerators and use [Cortex] M3s inside, but it changes what I’m doing on the high-level Android side.”
When ARM’s multi-core processors tipped up at Mobile World Congress earlier this year firms were banging on about it would be a golden age of power efficiency due to being able to run multiple cores at lower frequencies. Now less than a year later and with dual-core smartphones still having relatively poor battery life, it looks like that strategy has gone for a Burton. Goren admits that homogenous multi-core architectures do have a problem.
“Multicores give you scalability in a range, performance goes up and down within this range based on how many cores are active and what is the voltage level for these cores. On the other hand it has a floor, this floor is when you have one core running at the lowest voltage. What we have identified is a need for general processing power, meaning running Android, even at a lower [power] level,” said Goren.
Goren said ARM’s A7 processor will allow TI to ramp up the Cortex A15 core without hurting the ‘idle’ performance of the more frequently used Cortex A7 core.
ARM Has Explosive Quarter
ARM is kicking but this quarter by reporting another yet another quarter yesterday, their sales were up 26 percent year-over-year.
The revenues for ARM hit $191 million, with a profit of about $35.5 million. Unfortunately, the bad currency exchange rates reduced the profit to $20.3 million.
Analysts are estimating that about 1.85 billion ARM-licensed chips were manufactured this quarter and global shipments are expected to surpass 8 billion units by the end of the year, making ARM a part of the billion dollar club.
The sales were driven by the strong demand for smartphones and tablets which ARM owns a considerable share of the market since many manufacturers use their processors like the Cortex.
Software Issues Plague ARM Servers
PC World is reporting software issues are hurting the ARM Processors and may inhibit it from being a serious contender to x86 Processors. Dell Computer started testing some of the processors in low-end servers to appease some of their larger clients. It appears that these companies were interested in the low power and density in data centers.
Dell’s General Manager of Server Platforms stated “he had major concerns about the weak software ecosystem surrounding ARM. He said that there are lots of advantages from the architecture even if it means porting your code over to that new instruction set and maintaining two different software stacks. But he said that there are time and cost issues associated with porting software from x86 to ARM.” Read More….
Intel MeeGO Tablets Expected In June
February 1, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Intel announced that it intends to launch tablets based on the tablet version of MeeGo 1.2 in June 2011.
It is understood that most of them will launch final hardware in Q3 2011. The tablet preview program has already started and some developers are submitting applications as we speak. Intel’s App Up center for tablet should also be ready in Q3 2011.
With the big launch slated for Q3 2011 we are sure that Intel can have some designs ready for a hardware launch rather than a paper event. Intel’s tablet strategy also relies on Windows 7 as well as on Gingerbread and Honeycomb, whatever can help the golden goal of selling more Atoms. ……Read more