ARM Details First Quarter 2013 Finances, Company Revenue Up 26% YoY

Subject: General Tech | April 25, 2013 - 01:14 AM | Tim Verry
Tagged: SoC, mobile, ARMv8, arm

British chip design company ARM recently released an unaudited financial report with details on its Q1 2013 performance. The mobile SoC giant announced that it saw 2.6 million ARM chips in the first quarter of this year, a 35% improvement over last year and further evidence that ARM still dominates the low-power mobile market.

In fact, the chip designer made $94.9 million in licensing all those ARM chips, which was a big chunk of the company’s total Q1 2013 revenue of $263.9 million. Revenue was up by 26% versus the first quarter of the previous year (Q1 2012), which was only $209.4 million. Further, ARM’s profit (pre-tax) is 89.4 million pounds or approximately $137 million USD.

ARM saw revenue from both licensing and royalties increase year over year (YoY) by 24% and 33% which indicates that more companies are jumping into the mobile and embedded markets with ARM chips or licenses to make custom designs of their own. According to the report, the company sold five-times more Mali GPUs, saw a 50% increase in ARM-powered embedded devices, and noticed a 25% increase in ARM mobile devices year over year respectively. ARM has also started moving ARMv8 (64-bit ARM) licenses. Of the total 22 licenses in Q1 2013, 7 of the licenses were for ARM’s Cortex-A50 series processors along with a single ARMv8 license (a total of 9 to date). In Q1 2013, ARM also sold three Mali GPU licenses, and one of those was for the company’s high-end Skymir GPU.

In all, ARM had a good first quarter and is showing signs of increased growth. With ARMv8 on the horizon, I am interested to see the company’s numbers next year and how they compare year over year as ARM attempts to take over the server room in particular. The profits and revenue are modest in comparison to X86 giant Intel's Q1 2013 results, but are not bad at all for a company that doesn’t produce chips itself!

You can find ARM's Q1 2013 report here.

Source: ARM

Calxeda gains some allies in the Server War

Subject: General Tech | October 10, 2012 - 01:57 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: calxeda, arm, 64bit, ARMv8

There are two very big hurdles for Calxeda to overcome if it wants its ARM based servers to make any headway in the market. The first is OS support which could be the hardest to overcome as they are dependant on programmers making Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE compatible with ARM chips, Microsoft has already announced that the first version of Windows Server 2012 will not support ARM. Compatibility is something that Calxeda cannot fix on its own, however the lack of a x64 chip is something that they can work to solve and thanks to the $55M they just received they can now move forward on finishing the chip design. That money came from an impressive list of allies including the current parent company of GLOBALFOUNDRIES, ATIC as well as ARM Holdings, Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Highland Capital Partners and will be used to design the next Cortex A15 and an as of yet unnamed x64 chip. Check out The Register for more.

"ARM chip upstart Calxeda is lining its coffers as it prepares to do battle with its 32-bit EnergyCore ECX-1000 processors, and two more cores in its roadmap, to conquer some corner of the server world.

Calxeda now has more than 100 employees, who work in its Austin, Texas headquarters as well as in development labs in Silicon Valley and throughout Asia, and it needs cash as it ramps up sales and etches future EnergyCore processors to handle heavy duty workloads and 64-bit code."

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Tech Talk

Source: The Register

ARM, TSMC to Produce 64-bit Processors With 3D Transistors

Subject: Processors | July 24, 2012 - 12:07 PM | Tim Verry
Tagged: TSMC, ARMv8, arm, 64-bit, 3d transistors, 20nm

Yesterday ARM announced a multi-year partnership with fab TSMC to produce sub-20nm processors that utilize 3D FinFET transistors. The collaboration and data sharing between the two companies will allow the fabless ARM SoC company the ability to produce physical processors based on its designs and will allow TSMC a platform to further its process nodes and FinFET transistor technology. The first TSMC-produced processors will be based on the ARMv8 architecture and will be 64-bit compatible.

The addition of 3D transistors will allow the ARM processors to be even more power efficient and suitable for both mobile devices. Alternatively, it could allow for higher clockspeeds at the same TDP ratings as current chips. The other big news is that the chips will be moving to a 64-bit compatible design, which is huge considering ARM processors have traditionally been 32-bit. By moving to 64-bit, ARM is positioning itself for server and workstation adoption, especially with the recent ARM-compatible Windows 8 build due to be released soon. Granted, ARM SoCs have a long way to go before taking market share from Intel and AMD in the desktop and server markets in a big way but it is slowly but surely becoming more competitive with the x86-64 giants.

TSMC’s R&D Vice President Cliff Hou stated that the collaboration between ARM and TSMC will allow TSMC to optimize its FinFET process to target “high speed, low voltage and low leakage.” ARM further qualified that the partnership would give ARM early access to the 3D transistor FinFET process that could help create advanced SoC designs and ramp up volume production.

I think this is a very positive move for ARM, and it should allow them to make much larger inroads into the higher-end computing markets and see higher adoption beyond mobile devices. On the other hand, it is going to depend on TSMC to keep up and get the process down. Considering the issues with creating enough 28nm silicon to meet demand for AMD and NVIDIA’s latest graphics cards, a sub-20nm process may be asking a lot. Here’s hoping that it’s a successful venture for both companies, however.

You can find more information in the full press release.

Source: Maximum PC

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ARM follows Intel and AMD's 64 bit lead

Subject: General Tech | October 31, 2011 - 11:57 AM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: cortex, ARMv8, arm, 64bit

We've now some more detailed information on ARMs new 64 bit ARMv8 processor and its strengths and weaknesses. For the most part it resembles the 64 bit architecture that Intel and AMD use, an extended 32 bit architecture with several hold overs. Perhaps the most disappointing is that ARM has the same 48 bit limit to virtual address space that the competition has. If ARM had managed to overcome the limitations of canonical form addresses, they would have something that neither Intel nor AMD could bring to the server room. ARM desperately needs somthing to offer that the competition cannot if they are to convince admins to move from a familiar architecture to a brand new ARM architecture; power savings probably won't be enough. Drop by The Inquirer to read up on the improved exception levels and encryption acceleration of the new ARMv8 architecture.

"At the ARM TechCon conference in Santa Clara on Thursday, the top brass at ARM Holdings, the company that controls the core designs and licenses them to a slew of chip makers for modification in smartphones, tablets, and other embedded devices, showed off the new ARMv8 architecture. It's an incremental improvement over the current v7 architecture, just like the 64-bit extensions to the original 32-bit x86 processors from Intel and AMD were."

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Source: The Register

PC Perspective

ARM Details First Quarter 2013 Finances, Company Revenue Up 26% YoY

Subject: General Tech | April 25, 2013 - 01:14 AM | Tim Verry Tagged: SoC, mobile, ARMv8, arm