I don't know if it was the vibe Arm's marketing was going for, but if you wanted to evoke The Matrix without infringing any copyrights, The NEOVERSE does the trick. It's hard to believe but The Matrix will be twenty years old next year—it came out in 1999. There were three keynotes on the opening day of Arm TechCon: Simon Segars, CEO of Arm, on The 5th Wave of Computing . Marcello Claure, COO of Softbank, which owns (most of) Arm, on Collaborating to Deliver a Trillion Device World . Drew Henry, who runs Arm's Infrastructure Line of Business, on Preparing the Cloud for the Fifth Wave of Computing. Simon Segars Simon kicked off with a digression to Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, who invented some of the basic concepts of computing that we use today but were limited to mechanical implementation. If you want to read more about what happened in the 1980s when Babbage's Difference Engine was built, using the original drawings but modern machine tools, then see my post British Computer Museums . The four waves of computing were: Mainframe (and its software) PC and the software business Internet Mobile and Cloud The 5th Wave in computing is what we collectively do for the next couple of decades: generating data, transporting data, processing data. 5G is part of the 5th wave, a network for a world where data is everything. Just as some of what has happened was hard to imagine before but now we take for granted (smartphones, Google, social media, digital photography, GPS) Simon says he is: superconfident that in 5 years when we look back we’ll see some service that we all take for granted enabled by 5G. For a start, there will be a trillion devices, orders of magnitude more of connected things, with more intelligence pushed to the edge enabled by machine learning (another key ingredient of 5th Wave of Computing). Simon moved to Arm servers. This was a timely topic since Cadence had announced that morning our verification suite running on Arm-based HPE servers (see my post Of Arms and the Man I Sing from that morning). As Simon put it: When it comes to datacenters we are “all in” But Arm is very aware that the future of all this requires security, and things won't happen unless we (I think he means the industry in general, not just Arm) are trusted. Spectre and Meltdown were an example that security is not a static thing. With each new technology, somebody thinks of how to break into it (I find the most amazing thing about Spectre and Meltdown was not that it was new technology, it was vulnerable technology that had been hiding in plain sight for almost 20 years). Last year at TechCon Arm had introduced the Security Manifesto. There was an updated edition on every seat this year. Collaboration too. The Fifth Wave will take an ecosystem. Well, if I'm the decision maker, I have to award the Gold medal in ecosystem building to Arm, who built their company from a small barn in Cambridge with little going for them, to what it is today. Marcello Claure Next up was Marcello Claure, to talk about a trillion devices. That's 100 things per person, and (according to McKinsey) nearly $11T in economic value. Marcello admitted that up to now IoT has been pretty boring, 80% to do with regulations or to reduce costs: smart-meters, automotive electronics. Good and useful, but not disruptive ("smart meters are not that smart"). But now things are going to get massively disruptive. Softbank owns Sprint (in fact Marcello is Chairman) and Marcello talked as if the merger with T-Mobile was a done deal. But it is not yet, and the longer time passes the less likely (in my opinion) it is since T-Mobile is doing well and growing, and Spring is struggling. But not to rain on the parade, the 5G coverage they will have is impressive, in his map below. Marcello talked about some of the other Softbank investments such as Ping An Good Doctor, GM Cruise, OYO Hotels. But he circled back as to how it is all about partnering with Arm to go further faster. In 30 years, he expects intelligence of AI to exceed that of the human brain by a million times. Drew Henry After that, it was up to Drew to bring us down to earth and worry about how we connect all of this. One impact is the growing part of the semiconductor industry that is Arm-powered. Drew's numbers were that there are 1.6M "other" wafers on the chart (x86 as he said in the keynote, some of Intel and AMD) but 35M Arm-based wafers. I don't think that's entirely a fair comparison since Intel doesn't do much embedded and mostly builds full-chip-sized servers, whereas Arm is counting all the mobile application-processor silicon, most of which is not the Arm processor. But, to be fair, it is not just mobile. As Drew went on to say: We are well known for success in client devices like smartphones. But we have a lot of success in infrastructure. Routers, TOR switches, gateways etc. Arm is #1 units shipped (by far). Arm servers are being deployed for the networking and storage stacks. He even mentioned Annapurna at AWS, which I'd just been mystified about at CDNLive Israel the day before (see my post CDNLive Israel 2018 for more about that keynote). Arm NEOVERSE Finally, the big announcement of Arm NEOVERSE, the cloud-to-infrastructure foundation for the world of 1T intelligent devices. Arm's focus today is Cosmos at 16nm, which has 24 cores. The Ares in 7nm comes in 2019. The Zeus in 2020 in 7nm+. And the Poseidon platform in 2021 in 5nm. To be honest, it was unclear to me what Arm is doing and what partners are doing, or even where the boundary of Cosmos and the later platforms is (see diagram to right). Their architecture partners are investing, too. "We are working very closely with Annapurna part of AWS." It's funny, I don't think I'd heard of Annapurna until CDNLive the day before Arm TechCon. Suddenly they are impossible to escape. There are partners across the board (including Cadence, down by Drew's knees). But the big system companies they have listed are impressive: HPE, Cisco, Nokia, ZTE, Ericsson, and more. One of the disadvantages of their panoramic screen that stretched completely across the hall is that it is hard to capture all that you want in a photo. Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.![]()
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