(uplifting music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. In this segment, we're going to talk about the future of IoT and the critical role semiconductor technology plays in shaping this exciting space. As we've reported on our Breaking Analysis segments, the fabulous chip company enabled by the ARM ecosystem has permanently changed the semiconductor industry. Intel's fateful decision in the mid-2000s to pass on the chip design for the Apple iPhone was an ironic reminder of IBM's decision to outsource the microprocessor for the original IBM PC to Intel. In both cases, the market leader didn't appreciate the tectonic industry shifts that were possible, and importantly, the impact that volume economics would have on the power structure of the entire industry. Now fast forward today, and we believe ARM wafer volumes are 10X those of the general purpose x86. This means that the ARM ecosystem is on a cost curve that is unmatched in the business. Moreover, as we've reported, the ARM ecosystem is blowing away the historical performance curves that we've seen in the chip industry, AKA Moore's law. Whereas for years, the x86 performance curve grew roughly at 40% per annum has now moderated to the low thirties. Over the past five years, as evidenced by the progression of Apple's A series chip, based on ARM, when you observe the combined performance of the CPU, the GPU, the NPU, the XPU, DSPs, accelerators, et cetera, the alternative processors in combination have driven the average annual performance improvement to over a hundred percent per year. This is an astounding achievement. Why is this so important to IoT? Well, the edge is projected to be the next trillion dollar market. We believe we'll see a world with more than a trillion devices. And as we've reported, IoT use cases are going to require specialized and distributed processing power. And lots of it. AI Inference at the edge will enable real-time action and embedding intelligence in the chips that when the edge will be high performance, low power, inexpensive, and programmable with a much faster time to market profile than historical semiconductor cycles. We're already seeing that with companies like AWS, Apple, Tesla, and peer, and others going from design to tape out and under two years versus the historical norm of let's say four years to be generous. And with me to discuss innovation in IoT and some big news from the 2021 ARM's summit is Mohamed Awad, who is the vice president of IoT and embedded at ARM Mohamed. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. Thanks. I really appreciate the opportunity to have you. >> So, You're welcome. So tell us about your, your role at ARM. I know you were responsible for infrastructure previously and now sort of extended to, to IoT and embedded. Tell us more about. >> Yeah, sure. So I've been with ARM for a little over three years now. I started working with the infrastructure team when I was, we worked on a lot of different initiatives and one of the things that we launched was on Neo verse. And we went on to do some interesting things there, as, as I mentioned, we're making some great traction in the infrastructure space, but a year ago I took on the role to you ought to head up arms IOT and embedded business. And, you know, it's, it's interesting because my, my career really started in IOT and embedded. I was in the Boston area working for companies like Lucent Nortel, and then eventually I remembered very early IOT startup. So that was, that was 25 years ago now. But, but I still got roots in the Boston area. So I like your, like your hat in the back now. >> Yeah. Right. Go, go Sox. >> Go Sox. >> So how did we get here, you mean, you've had a lot of experience in embedded IOT, which is relatively new term to most people. It sort of evolved from a period of, you know, you had instrumentation for at least some components of, of the system. And then we focused on conductivity. But as I was saying in my upfront narrative, we're really now embedding AI and it's it's intelligence, but so there's phases. How do you see the progression in terms of how we got to where ARM is today in IOT? >> Yeah, it's really interesting because if you think about, if you think about ARM, then you really just think about IOT, you know, as you said, IOT started off with, Hey, let's, let's stick a microcontroller in everyday devices, you know, stick a micro controller to something like a vending machine, and then we went on and said, well, hey, what if we could remotely control that device for gathering data from that device, and then we, so we entered this phase of, you know, what we like to call interconnectivity, right, And that was all about, you know, connecting these devices with, with things like, you know, low power Bluetooth, or, you know, even now low latency 5G. And what's interesting is that, you know, together the work of the Arm ecosystem has done over the years has really solved the problems of how to add microcontrollers that connects the devices. I mean, that those problems have largely been solved for a lot of the reasons that you described earlier, which is, you know, we focused on lowering the barrier for folks to come in and innovate around sort of a core technology and, and lots of innovation happened as a result of that. We're entering this new phase now, which is really about, you know, you've got all these devices out there which can easily be connected, they've got microcontrollers or, or, or technology in them, which allows them to, to be intelligent. But how do we really extract the level of kind of AI intelligence out of those devices? Ultimately, what we're trying to do is, is, you know, the industry needs to figure out how to derive intelligence from the smallest sensor, all the way up to the largest cloud data center, you know, and, and, and that means local intelligence. It means regional intelligence, and it means global intelligence, you know, the potential is enormous, but the challenge is pretty enormous as well because of all those diversified use cases, all the diversified devices, all the, all of the sort of scale sort of number of platforms that we're talking about, and that that's really what, we're, what we're excited to kind of go work on, work on that. >> It is exciting. I mean, just the it's mind boggling the, the capabilities, the processing capabilities of this distributed world that we're, we're, we're evolving towards. Let's talk about the hard news of why are you announcing what you're announcing, I mean, what are the trends that are sort of informing that maybe you could hit some of the highlights of the announcement and give us a key details? >> Yeah, sure. So, so when we announced his ARM, total solutions for IOT, and that's really made up of three things, my favorite part is on virtual hardware. Our virtual hardware is all about making available a virtual representation of, of devices in the cloud for lots of developers to use. And I'll, I'll get to that in a minute, but I think, you know, in order to understand that you have to kind of understand the broader context of what ARM total solutions are. It starts with pre-integrated pre verified IP package. You talked earlier about how design cycles we're looking to accelerate people were looking to develop a Silicon much faster. Part of what we were doing at ARM is we're actually taking, you know, pre-integrated pre verified IP packages and call those ARM corstone. We're making those available to the market. So we give those to our Silicon partners, and then they can use that. They might include an neuro processing unit, a CPU. They might include the interconnect, all the, kind of the base IP. And then our Silicon partners can use that as a jumping off point so that they can quickly get Silicon to market. That's the first part of the news, which is, you know, we're doubling down on that too. Now, you know, in the last three years, we've had over 150 different designs, which have used our ARM core stone products. So moving forward, we're going to make that foundational to how we deliver IOT technology to the market. But the second part of it, which is, which is super exciting, is that not only are we going to accelerate the time to market for our Silicon partners, we're also making a virtual representation of that underlying core stone design available in the cloud for software developers all around the world to use at the same time that IP is ready. So at the same time, we hand IP to our Silicon partners. We're making a virtual representation in the cloud. So software developers can start. Now, let me just take a step back here and make sure that, you know, everyone kind of understands how, how big of a deal this is, right before the way this used to work, I would hand the IP to a Silicon partner. It would take them, you know, 18 months, maybe two years to get a piece of Silicon in market. And then a board manufacturer would have to go off. And then only maybe three or four years later, could the software developers start five years to get a product to market what we're doing here with ARM total solutions. We cut that five years down to three years, so we can massively accelerate time to market. And then the third part of what ARM total solution is, is something we call projects Centaury Project Centaury is about putting in place a set of standards to it's an ecosystem initiative, which puts in place a set of standards, reference software and, and specifications around things like security and how devices should communicate with, with, you know, the operating system or cloud service providers that allows that allows software developers to get a level of reuse and leverage. So, you know, today in the IOT, every time you develop a piece of software, you're going to develop it over and over again. But what we're talking about here is they can develop it once and, and be able to apply. And we use a lot of that software over and over again, the same way they do in other markets like infrastructure. >> Love it. So, okay. I want to ask you if that, if there's a blueprint there that we can, we can learn from, but before we do that. So if I, if I go back to the three items that you mentioned, so for example, one of your licensees can say, okay, I want to take just the standard components, the CPU, whatever, but I might want to customize the neural processing unit, as you said, and they have the flexibility to do that at the same time when they, when they bring it to the Foundry, because it's a standard platform that, you know, what's going to work, that's kind of a nuance that maybe people maybe don't fully appreciate, but am I getting that right? That standard platform has dramatically changed the industry. >> Yeah, that's right. I mean, the idea is, is that, you know, we take these, these IPS, we integrate them together. We verify them, we designed it as a subsystem. We target specific use cases, and then we make them available. Our partners are certainly free to go off and make modifications to it. They see fit. But when we hand it to them, it's ready to go. And that's the idea. >> Yeah. And then the point about the being able to, to give developers access in the cloud, and we've often said that, you know, the developers are going to shape IOT. And so I think what you're saying is essentially instead of this linear process, where you can get dependent on the previous one being done, you're actually parallelizing. If you will, the innovation. >> Yeah. That's exactly right. And I, and I'd actually take it one step forward. There's a, there's a subtlety there, which I didn't comment on, which I think it's important to call out, which is not only are we parallelize them, but we're enabling what I'll call modern development methodology. Right. You know, the way that development is done in areas like mobile and the cloud data centers, they use agile workflows, things like continuous integration, you know, broad-based testing as they go along. That's very different than the way that embedded development is done today. Embedded development today is done the same way. It was 25 years ago. You get a board on your desk, you mess around with a bunch of jumpers and cables and wires, hope you did it right. And then you write your software and you hope the hardware guy doesn't want to revise the hardware because then you're going to start all over again. Right. You know, the last thing that you'd want to do is set up a hardware form, right? Lots and lots of different hardware to go off and test over and over again. Now with virtual hardware, you can move all of that to the cloud. All that complexity goes away and you've massively reduced the investment required for software developers to get going and allow them to take on these more modern techniques. >> Well, Mohammed, thank you for clarity clarifying that, that nuance, because we're going to see a Renaissance in the way that that embedded development occurs. And I'm curious as to how you think about that in terms of you, because you're going to have a whole new breed of developers come in with, you know, the cloud developers, if you will. They have, they see IOT as a massive opportunity as well. You're going to see the, I would presume the embedded ecosystem. Up-skill a much in the same way you're seeing, you know, ops dev or dev ops or IT people, you know, learn Python to you know, to up-skill. And so you're going to see like a two vectors of innovation in terms of developers coming together. How do you see that? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's exactly what we're driving to. And when we talk about this, we talk about changing the economics of IOT. That's exactly why, because what we, what we're saying is that, Hey, you can have all this massive innovation that can be unleashed from all these developers that didn't have access to these devices before. And you can also take all these embedded devices, embedded developers and make them so much more efficient with these new modern, modern development methodologies. A combination of those two things is going to, you know, not only is it going to lower the cost of development, but it's going to spur a massive amount of new innovation and all, you know, all new products and services, right. We really think can unleash the potential of IoT. >> So step back a little bit, help us understand kind of how you came to this, your strategy. You mean, what were the friction points or what are the friction points that you see in IOT and embedded in terms of being able to, to, to, to scale this capability? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a good, it's a great question. And I got to tell you, we, we, when so when we, when I came, when I came into this role, you know, the first thing you do is you go off and talk to customers and partners, and you try to understand how people are using. But most of the time, when people think of ARM, they think of us as, Hey, they're the guys that are off talking to the Silicon partners are talking to the hardware guys. And we absolutely do. We have strong relationships with all of the Silicon partners, but because of our place in the ecosystem, you know, as a, as a company, which, you know, we've got shipped over 70 billion cortex spend devices today, you know, we underpinned, you know, the IOT basically runs on us. And so a lot of what we do too, is we talked to the software ecosystem. We talked to OEMs, and we talked to service providers looking to capitalize on all of that, you know, on the, on the depth and breadth of our ecosystem. And when I talked to OEMs, and when I talked to software service providers, two things became really clear. The OEM is wanting to find a faster path to market. They're like, it just takes too long for us to get our products to market. We need to figure out how to streamline it. So that was one. When I talked to the software service providers, they came to us with a little bit of a different problem. What they said is like, Hey, we really want to deploy software and services across this, this IOT edge space, but it's just so diverse. And so massively complex, you know, everybody's got a different view on thing. Can you help us, like, where's the, your, the common denominator, can you help us figure out how to attack this problem? And that's really what drove, what drove us. Right. >> Awesome. Let's talk a little bit more about some of the announcement, details, project Centaury particular, what are some of the things that you want people to really appreciate, and specifically, what does it mean to the ecosystem? I mean, you touched on it a little bit, but I don't know if you have any examples or customers and, and, and maybe also Mohamed, if you could help us understand how it relates to other arm projects like Cassini. >> Yeah, sure. So project, so, so, so two things. So first of all, let me just talk to what, what, what projects Centaury. So project Centaury is really looking to, you know, help enable a level of, of software leverage across that diverse M class devices that are out there in class with our microcontroller devices that are out there. And so it's really made up of 3, 3, 3 parts. One part is, is all about security. So it uses a PSA and our PSA certified framework, including TFM trusted firmware. So this is our security framework that we've put forward. And then our, the PSA standards initiative that's out there in the marketplace, you know, in all of the efforts that we bring to bear on that, the second part of it is, is around open CMSIS, and, and open CDI CMSIS, which is really, which is really about standardizing aspects about how software is delivered to an IOT device packaged and delivered. It's also about things like how any our thoughts. So any real-time operating system or any cloud service provider, you know, can be accessed from the device. So the idea is, is that a, you know, today, if you think about the way that this works, if you're a Silicon provider, you're a fiber manufacturer, you have to go off and support multiple different clubs, service providers. You may want to support multiple different operating systems, depending on you know, which, which, you know, which particular OS you're interested in. And, and what we're trying to do with, with, with, with projects Centaury is to specify key attributes of the services that exist down on your, on your Silicon, so that you can more easily integrate with, you know, whatever OS you want, whatever service provider you want on whatever hardware you want. It's still allowing plenty of differentiation. So it's not like we're saying, Hey, this is how you actually do over the air updates. For example, rather, what it's saying is that, Hey, this device supports over the updates. If you're going to ask for that service, here's how you present yourself. And that allows a level of software portability that you just didn't have in the IOT space previously. >> Right. And then the licensee can tune that to their specific use case and add their own value. Right. And so, again, go back to the thing we talked about before they, they know what's going to work and they can give it to the, Foundry and say, make this according to the spec and the Foundry's ready for it. That's how we've seen such massive volumes. I want to ask you about security. You, you touched on that. Do you leverage realms in this, or is that not in scope? Is that like. >> No, that's more of a, that right now, that's more focused on our A-class and V9 stuff. And you actually asked about project Cassini a little bit earlier. You know, project Cassini is really our initiative, which is focused on our A-class devices. So our A-class devices typically run a, you know, what I'll call a rich OS like a Linux or whatever. And it's really designed for allowing the level of virtualization and allowing a level of, of, of, of, of shared resources between different containers on, on an A-class type system that you can easily deploy and, and leverage the A-class device resources from, by, by different, by different workloads. >> The reason I asked, I'm trying to Mohamed connect the dots between mobile as kind of a blueprint, which can occur for IOT. I think that's maybe, but even some of the stuff that's going on in the data center, it's particularly as it relates to data intensive workloads, some of the work that we've seen that, you know, AWS do, and, you know, offloads, we're seeing, you know, all the new, like all the modern storage and networking and security offloads in the data center are moving to ARM. And it just seems like the use cases for ARM are exploding. And I'm wonder if he can help us connect the dots into IOT, which could, which could do or follow all of these markets. >> Yeah. I mean, what's interesting what we saw happen in mobile and what we saw happen in the infrastructure, what we see happening in both of those markets is that by creating a level of consistency in how software can be deployed on these devices, whether that's with the, you know, with the mobile phone and the ARM ecosystem and a mobile phone, or all the way through to the data center, what you've done is you unleashed a tremendous amount of innovation, you know, in the mobile space. There's something like 3 million apps out there today, right. And thousands of different smartphone models, you know, could you imagine if every one of those app developers had to test their application on every mobile phone in order to be sure that it worked, you know, you'd have a lot less innovation, a lot less, you know, a lot less, a lot less scale and a lot less, a lot less applications. So what we're talking about here is trying to unleash that same amount of value by creating that consistent. So that's a clear lesson we learned from, from both mobile and from, from infrastructure. The other thing that's clear is that a lot of these markets you've got, back to the idea of, of parallelized development flows and, and subsystems, and that's directly kind of what we're seeing in, in what we're putting forth in, with, ARM total solutions. >> Yeah. You know, it's kind of buzz wordy and people who watch my program know I'm a kind of a fan of the R model, but, but you talk about the new IOT economy. In my view, you're actually an underpinning of that economy. I mean, everybody talks about it, this multi-trillion dollar opportunity, but, but how do you think about this, this new economy? And we've obviously touched on it, but IOT, the edge it's really taking, taking shape now and becoming real. >> Yeah. I, I think that the idea here, when we talk about a new IOT economy, very clearly what I'm referring to is this idea that, you know, you've got today, you've got a lot of potential, which is lost because, you know, your you're limited to just the, a vertically integrated solution. Software is vertically integrated on the, on the specific hardware and the, the barriers and the cost to investing in that hardware from a software perspective is just, it's just too high given, given the sort of scale that you get with that software after the fact. So we're addressing that in two vectors or simplifying it, so that lots of different developers, you know, that developer that's sitting at the coffee shop can spin up an AWS instance with our ARM virtual hardware on it and write an app while they're sitting there. And at the same time, they can access a much broader set of devices than they would've been able to otherwise, if it's not, you know, it's not dissimilar, you know, I hate to keep going back to mobile, but it's not dissimilar from the mobile space where if you think about 15 years ago, when all of the applications that were written on your mobile phone were written by the phone manufacturer, you had a limited number of applications, and sure a phones were a great thing, but it was nothing like it is today. It was a mobile phone economy. Today, when you think about mobile, you know, mobile really underpins the financial economy. It underpins, you know, transport, the transportation economy. It underpins how we communicate with everybody, with social networks and it, and it's really taken a sort of life of its own in lots of different ways. It's not really a mobile economy. It is the economy. And we think IOT can be even larger than that. Right? >> Yeah. You know what I mean? Our industry has a tendency to hype a lot of new waves, but they certainly didn't, over-hype mobile. I mean, everybody, you know, migrated toward mobile. That's why I think it's such a relevant conversation. And so adaptable to IOT at the cloud as well, data as well. You know, they, they were probably under hyped. If anything, social, maybe we can put over here in a bucket, there's a lot, a lot of Friction. But those other three in terms of sort of enterprise and the edge. And I think, you know, from, from what we can see ARM has really in the ecosystem has, has completely and permanently altered the shape of the industry. It's a very exciting time. And I think the best is yet to come Mohamed. I really appreciate you coming to the cube. Thanks so much. >> No, I, I really, I really appreciate, I think thanks for taking the time. All right. >> Thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (casual uplifting music)