Myriam Joire, @tnkgrl
We met up with ARM president Simon Segars at Mobile World Congress to talk about the company's recent milestones -- 8-core big.LITTLE processors, the powerful yet efficient Cortex-A50 architecture (which we discussed with James Bruce last year), MediaTek's Cortex-A7 quad-core SoC (the first of its kind) and Samsung's octa-core Exynos 5 chip -- to name a few. Hit the break to watch our video and read the interview transcript.
MJ: So obviously with quad-core becoming affordable, the next question is, you know -- and octa-core coming to life with these, you know, combinations of core types being built into the same chip -- where do you see this going? Are we going to, ten year from now, have these like 16 core or like multi-core devices that are going to be prevalent or do you think that from a software engineering point of view it become a challenge and it will kind of top off at a certain comfortable level. You know the PC market for example in terms of Intel architecture seems to have comfortably settled around dual core. Do you think there is something like that is going to happen? What is your prediction in that area? Obviously you don't have control over that, right?
SS: Yeah, I mean I think what you see today, having eight cores on the same die seems like, to use your language, crazy. I mean it's a lot of processing capability in a phone, and on one level it is crazy to think, "Well, what is all that going to get used for?" But the great thing about phones is the fact that it's a very open platform. Developing software is very easy, very low cost; and as you put all this performance in, somebody will think of something to do with it. So eight cores seems like far more in the land of compute power today. Will we see 16, 32 in a few years time? I think two things are going to govern that. Basically the drive of Moore's Law driving cost down meaning that you can put all of those transistors in at very low cost. A few years ago having a quad-core in 28 nanometer at very low price point seemed just unrealistic. But with, you know... technology always gets cheaper, and it's amazing what can be done, and MediaTek have demonstrated that. So overtime I'm sure you'll see more and more cores. And there is a limit to how much parallelism you can get out of any one application, but I think you'll see the different processors being used for different tasks in parallel. Where the limit is of that I don't know. I mean when you think back, you know, the iPad is only three years old. Smartphones themselves are a relatively new product category, and I don't think we're at the end of people just working out what they can be used for by any means.
MJ: No, there's no doubt. In terms of really low power, high efficiency, low compute power ARM cores like for example what's in a device like the Pebble for example, what needs to happen in that area? Do you think there are some significant breakthroughs coming up?
SS: Well I think a lot of the technology building blocks are there. I think some of the chips we're going see built around very small, very low cost micro-controllers integrated with sensors. Again, I think we're kind of at the tip of that, and again, it's made possible due to the technologies all coming together. And building a chip to do that kind of thing is much less expensive than building a chip to do an eight-core application processor. So I think you're going to see a lot of new device coming out with people using these building block in different ways. And I think it's going to be pretty interesting to see what people do. And then, with low cost connectivity to your phone, and having your phone control that or aggregate the data and interact with cloud services, I think it's going to be pretty exciting to see what people think up, what the end applications are that never have been imagined before.
MJ: Yeah, I absolutely agree. Well listen, thanks for your time, Simon. It's been lovely getting your insight on, you know, some of the kind of forward vision towards what ARM can bring. I mean, you guys are pretty much ruling the world right now so it's an exciting time.
SS: It is an exciting time. Again, from our perspective it's about great technology and in enabling people to build all these exciting products. You know, we don't have a monopoly on great ideas for all of this. What's great is how many users can just interact with technology and build end devices. It makes for a fun time.
MJ: Great. Well thanks for you time again.
SS: Thanks a lot.