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ARM spreads tentacles up and down the stack

Cloud-connected OS ramps up its IoT challenge another notch

Get into mBed: The functions

ARM increasingly aims to build on its power in mobile processor IP by adding more and more software functionality and seeking to create a standard silicon/software platform that it controls.

Security has been an important focus of this strategy, and now it is greatly enhancing the role of its mBed platform, which begun life in 2006 as a way for developers to test embedded functions online and for students to experiment with programming their designs.

The new OS has a device-side element, running on Cortex M-based controllers, but the server-side mBed Device Server is processor-agnostic, and will run in virtualised environments and full processors, which could well be x86-based. This indicates the increasingly complex balancing acts ARM will have to achieve between keeping its broad base of partners united around a single architecture, with limited conflicts of interest; and seeking to push its software efforts across a multiplatform IoT. In smartphones, this balance was simple, since other processor designs had such a small share of the space – the same is unlikely to be true in the more diverse embedded sectors.

The operating system, which also incorporates the critical IoT activities of security and device management, is free for small scale use and prototyping but there will be an undisclosed royalty for large commercial public or private cloud services. It will be supplied as open source code that users can modify under an Apache 2.0 licence, apart from some advanced features, which will be provided in binary form. The OS will be made available to ARM’s partners and developers in the fourth quarter, and should appear on products early next year. Existing M-class controllers can be upgraded to run the OS, if they have the capability.

Conflicts of interest in the ARM ecosystem

There are about 17 embedded OSs available now, some of which are plumping themselves up to move higher up the IoT layers, such as Micrium (this specialist firm recently announced an end-to-end IoT strategy). Microsoft has two of its own, but of course, as in other software areas, the big growth is in open source. Almost half the platforms are Linux-based, the most widely used being FreeRTOS, according to EETimes.

It will be vital, of course, that ARM converts a large proportion of its existing base to its new designs, whether current microcontroller licensees, or CPU customers which are also making the move into the IoT, like Qualcomm. Most of the firms publicly pledging support for mBed OS were existing clients, including Atmel, CSR, Farnell, Freescale, IBM, Marvell, Megachips, Multitech, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Renesas, Seecontrol, Semtech, Silicon Labs, Stream Technologies, ST, Telenor Connexion, Telefonica, Thundersoft, u-blox, wot.io and Zebra.

It is notable that Broadcom is missing from the list, but also that ARM has secured some strong server-side supporters, notably IBM and Salesforce.com, which have committed to ensure their applications can connect to mBed servers to access the data from the "things".

Richard Barry, founder of the firm which developed FreeRTOS, told the journal that ARM’s mBed OS move was "analogous to its compiler strategy where it invests heavily in free compilers and also promotes its own heavily. ARM is full of contradictions... It both wants to enable processors and dominate the tools market at the expense of its ecosystem." The breadth and functionality of an OS’s runtime software and tools will be critical, and this is an area where Wind River has been active for years.

The Intel unit will surely be a significant barrier to ARM’s plans for IoT domination, since it combines a venerable real time platform, whose ecosystem and tools base has been steadily enriched over the years, with being an important weapon in Intel’s armoury.

And of course, Intel is as desperate as ARM to offset stagnating revenues in traditional markets (in its case, PCs) with a leading position in the IoT.

And Imagination, which now owns the MIPS processor cores, is also making a big play for the IoT, and knows this will need to include extensive software. It recently announced FlowCloud, a device and cloud platform for the MIPS cores.

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