ARM appears to be doing very well, as far as can be gathered from the information provided in its latest financial update, generating a profit of more than £300million in 2014 from revenues of about £795m.
The company, in general, has a two pronged approach to business – licensing cores and then enjoying royalties from each instantiation of the core. In 2014, the company made £309m from processor licenses and £326m from royalties. Royalties, of course, are the future revenue stream.
Famous for providing the computing power for mobile phones – still a substantial part of its revenue stream – ARM has since broadened its outlook, with its technology appearing in cars, printers and data centres, to name a few sectors.
But the one market – if you can call it a market – on which ARM has its eyes is the Internet of Things. It's been laying the ground over the last couple of years and appears to be positioning itself to be a major player.
Buried in its latest financial information is a hint of the technology ARM is developing for the IoT. It signed 23 licences in Q4 2014 for Cortex-M class processors, which it believes will be the key components of smart connected devices – such as smart sensors and low power wireless communication chips.
But here's the pointer – five of these licences are for next generation processors called Teal and Grebe. These, says ARM, are designed for energy efficient and secure embedded applications, ranging from smart automotive to wearable technology.
There is a growing feeling that IoT edge devices, far from being all but dumb, will need processing ability. Freescale's Geoff Lees believes many of these parts could need Cortex-A class processors, rather than an M0+. What is interesting is that Teal and Grebe appear to be based on a version of ARM's v8 architecture.
While the debate about the demise, or otherwise, of the 8bit MCU still rumbles on, the IoT is stepping into the world of 64bit processing.
