Boxing match
It has been a year of pretty much uninterrupted highs for UK low-power chip designer ARM, culminating in the unveiling of the design that it expects to be a game-changer a couple of days ago.
But one major fly in the ointment was the launch of Google TV, which features Intel as the chip partner in an embedded project ARM must have fancied for itself, and which begins shipping this month.
The fact that Intel is also a significant partner and shareholder of ARM rival Imagination Technologies, which has a significant interest in the set-top box (STB) market of its own, will have poured salt in that wound.
So barely pausing for breath after the Cortex-A15 launch, ARM has announced a web-enabled STB platform of its own - effectively taking on the Google TV partnership itself. This platform is based on the fastest currently-available ARM design - Cortex-A9.
ARM does have one partner of its own: Trident Micro - a chip-maker that specialises in making semiconductor solutions for the consumer electronics industry. Remember: ARM doesn't make chips; it licenses its designs to chip-makers. So in this capacity Trident is acting in a similar capacity to other ARM licensees, such as Texas Instruments.
"The integration of all the key components to enable a robust, internet media experience at home from the comfort of your sofa is a highly visible demonstration of the growing momentum behind the Cortex-A series of processors in STBs," said Ian Drew, EVP of marketing at ARM.
"By combining an industry-leading STB platform with the powerful Cortex-A series of processors, Trident and ARM bring the web-based runtime and user interface technologies traditionally found on PCs and mobile phones into the home entertainment system," said Tony Francesca, SVP and GM of the Trident STB business unit.
It must be stressed that this is a quite different proposition to Google TV in so much as it focuses purely on the silicon, as opposed to drawing in other hardware and software partners. Having said that, ARM has got Adobe involved in helping optimise this platform for Flash and below you can see a list of other parts of the ecosystem ARM is building around it. You can also see a block diagram from ARM demonstrating what an STB chip is comprised of.
- Qt, which runs on the Trident STB platform, provides a consistent user experience from mobile to home. Qt includes browser and widgets functionalities which run on top of QtWebKit, and extensive performance optimization work has been done for Qt running on ARM architectures.
- Qt is also the development framework for MeeGo and the ARM partnership has already done significant work on this platform around the ARM Cortex-A9 processor.
- Core runtime and plug in components that power the Adobe Flash platform for the digital home have been optimized for the ARM Cortex-A9, including ActionScript 3.0 JIT.
- HTML5, a new Web 2.0 standard that incorporates features like video playback, has also been optimised for ARM and will be key for next generation Web type services.
- The Google Android operating system, designed for the ARM architecture and including an ARM Native Development Kit (NDK), ARM targeted JIT as part of the Dalvik Java application framework and support for the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 web plugin.
- Linaro, a not-for profit company, focuses on the lower software layers and provides the best tools and Linux development experience on ARM, quickening the time to market for Linux based distributions.
