ARM looks to new opportunities

03 Oct 2012

In an exclusive interview with IP EXPO Online, ARM CEO Warren East explains how the semiconductor design company plans to tackle new markets.

Ninety-five percent of the world’s smartphones use microprocessors based on Cambridge-based ARM’s technology. Last year, 8 billion chips based on its architecture were shipped. But far from resting on his laurels, Warren East, the company’s CEO, has plans that involve tackling markets that are entirely new for the firm and, in several cases, dominated by hugely powerful incumbents.

One these market is servers, where data centre managers everywhere would love to tap into the low power consumption associated with ARM’s ultra energy efficient chips. The main trouble is, ARM doesn’t currently sell chips for servers - but it’s working on that, says East. That journey began in 2008 and isn’t scheduled to reach its final destination – the commercial availability of ARM servers – until 2014. But an important milestone will be reached “later on in 2013”, according to East, when the company releases its first 64-bit architecture chips. In 2014, these chips will enter real volume production. By 2020, East hopes that ARM servers will make up 20 percent of the overall server market. Early indications from ARM server prototypes that the company is running in its labs, he says, have suggested power savings in the region of 75 percent to close to 90 percent, compared to x86 servers offering comparable levels of computing power.

A second area is in personal devices, and more specifically, desktops, laptops and tablets – “client mobile computing”, as East calls it. While ARM already has a huge share in smartphone chips, it’s never been able to establish a foothold at all in PCs, a market that has been totally inaccessible, because Microsoft’s Windows software doesn’t run on ARM chips. With the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Windows 8, which will run on ARM, this problem goes away. “We’re now looking at a whole new class of device,” he says. “Of course we’re interested in it.”

The third area is machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. “Historically, sensors and meters haven’t used ARM chips – often they’ve used 8-bit chips - but we see demand for more intelligence from connected devices. But as silicon technology has moved on and prices have fallen, then the reasons for using 8-bit over 32-bit chips has gone away,” says East. “That whole sector of the market for us has shown triple-digit growth over the past four or five years.” Last year, he says, ARM shipped just shy of 1 billion chips for this market.

It will be fascinating to see how successfully ARM capitalises on these opportunities in the coming year – and the industry feathers it ruffles in the process. It faces challenges along the way, not least continued global economic uncertainty and the bubbling sovereign debt crisis in Europe, which East told the Financial Times in September could slow sales growth in the company’s financial second half of 2012. That said, even a modicum of success for ARM in these newer markets poses a considerable threat to other rival chipmakers.

Warren East will give his IP EXPO 2012 keynote presentation, Enabling innovation in next generation enterprise technology, on Thursday 18 October at 09:50 in the Keynote Theatre.