A few big.LITTLE licenses help generate big revenue growth for ARM
1 min read
ARM is seeing increasing licensing activity from Asian semiconductor companies and has just signed its first Chinese subscription license. Under the terms of this agreement, the unnamed company will gain access to a broad range of processor technology, including Mali graphics.
In all, ARM signed 25 processor licenses in Q2 2013, with half signed by Asian companies. Included are five licenses for ARM's Cortex-A series processors, two of which provide access to ARM's Cortex-A53 processor core. ARM says it now has 21 licensees for its 64bit v8 architecture.
There are now almost 1000 licenses for its various processor cores. While what it calls 'classic' cores remain the most popular, with 532 licenses, the Cortex-M range now has 179 licensees, with a further nine added in the last quarter.
Amongst the recent announcements of ARM based technology are Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa series, AMD's 'Seattle' server chips, with up to 16 Cortex-A57 cores running at 2GHz, and Atmel's Cortex-M0+ based SAM D20 microcontroller range.
ARM's business model sees royalties generated by each processor core shipped. In its financial statement, it says royalty revenues were generated by the sales of about 2.4billion ARM based devices in Q2, which it says is 18% higher than the same quarter in 2012. Of these, 29% were based on Cortex-M cores and 26% were targeted at embedded applications.
