ARM's second quarter results show the company grew revenue by 15% in Dollars over the same period in 2014, and by 22% when stated in Sterling. The figures also showed that processor royalty revenues grew by 31% year on year and that 54 licences were signed in Q2, which the company says is a record.
Pete Hutton, president of ARM's product groups, pictured, said: "The results are good. There's a nice 'uptick' in revenues and royalties and the 54 licences we signed is a record for one quarter. But one interesting point is that five of those licences were signed by large OEMS. That shows that more companies are starting to build their own chips."
According to Hutton, there are now a lot of companies working on next generation products, giving feedback and taking licences. "There were 150million ARMv8 cores shipped in the quarter and take up, which has only just started, is a lot faster than we predicted.
We did a lot of work to get the software in place and the ecosystem established. Now, users are getting to grips with v8 quite easily and are picking up the core faster than we thought."
Hutton said v8 cores are now being applied beyond the obvious areas of smartphones and tablets. "There's progress in enterprise networking and it's the early days in servers. The hardware is in place for servers, it's now the software ecosystem which needs developing, which is what we always thought.
"Servers were an area we pushed into, but we're now seeing pull from end users as they begin to see solutions in place. Now, it's about porting software to the ARM platform."
Meanwhile, another 20 Cortex-M licences were signed in the quarter, including six new customers, taking the total number of M class licenses to 318. The company says Cortex-M now represents 40% of all shipments of its processors.
Eight licences were signed for Cortex-R class processors. These included an additional licence for 'Kite', the first ARMv8-R class processor, which is designed for safety related automotive and industrial applications. "The Kite licence is one of the highlights of the quarter," Hutton concluded.
