ARM Goes Cloudy

ARM is looking beyond the mobile phone to establish its architecture in the New Connected World.

The NCW may be the future – in which case ARM will probably do well in it – or it may not be the future in which case ARM will simply stay as the provider of the dominant mobile processor architecture.

ARM has never been content to stand still. Its slogan: ‘The Architecture for the Digital World’ suggests ambition. So far, computers and servers have, mostly, resisted ARM’s expansionist thrust and now it is exploring beyond established markets to plant its flag on terra incognita

Last week we saw ARM teaming with IBM to provide an analytics + design + hardware starter kit for people developing IoT products.

This week ARM is providing network operators and service providers with a new approach for an Intelligent Flexible Cloud (IFC) environment to “meet the latency, power and size constraints for next-generation networks”.

The initiative has met with enthusiastic endorsements from silicon vendors Altera, Xilinx, AMD, AppliedMicro, Cavium, Marvell and EZChip, with all of them pointing out how eminently suitable their products are for heterogeneous computing within the IFC environment.

IFC weds SoCs to a common layer of enabling software and distributed network intelligence using technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), which combined with distributed intelligence enables applications to move out in the network to where data resides.