Panel: ARM to dominate consumer apps

Panel: ARM to dominate consumer apps

SAN ANTONIO—Vendors defended the mass migration to ARM cores for their low-power, broad spectrum of performance levels and more economical software here at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) Tuesday (June 19).

Freescale Senior Vice President Henri Richard's annual FTF panel discussion included ARM CEO Warren East, Tony Belkin, a director at medical-device maker director at Hospira Inc. (Lake Forest, Ill.), Greg Couch, business development director of modeling software at National Instruments Corp. (Austin, Texas) and Jeremy Hammer, chief technology officer at consumer electronics firm Ceton Corp. (Kirkland, Wash.)

"Apps today are being consumerized," said Freescale's Richard. "They are doing all the things that were previously being done by industrial and professional apps, but now they are doing it for consumers at a price point is that is way lower."

According to the panelists, this consumerization favors ARM cores for next-generation applications, since they are lower power than traditional PC- and server-style processors, plus they are already running the software, in industrial and professional settings, that is currently being ported to the consumer setting.

"For connected home entertainment devices, the lower power and less costly development effort made ARM and Linux the obvious choices to future-proof our applications," said Ceton's Hammer. "ARM has a much better power to performance ratio. And with a single board design, we found we could turn power up and down as needed to achieve the performance specs of each of our applications."

Belkin echoed that sentiment by citing dozens of applications Hospira has designed using ARM cores and its interchangeable software modules.

"We built a single ARM-based platform internally, then used it to ship 50 or 60 products across different application domains," Belkin said. "We discovered what was common about each solution, and those things that were different, then designed around any problems."


From left: Freescale senior vice president Henri Richard leads panelists Warren East (ARM), Tony Belkin (Hospira), Greg Couch (National Instruments) and Jeremy Hammer (Ceton).

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