ARM gives Internet of Things a piece of its mind – the Cortex-M7 ARM has had a look at the fridges, speakers and robots that use its Cortex-M series processor cores and decided they need a few maths lessons. The Cortex-M7's block diagram The Brit CPU designer has today revealed its new 32-bit Cortex-M7, which will sit at the top of its its microcontroller-grade family of cores in terms …
This whole "internet of things" nonsense is just a load of marketing BS driven by companies looking for any edge to sell their tat to some gullible geeks. An oven that you can talk to might be cool if you're a 15 year old boy, but most adults are quite capable of turning a dial. Same with the whole fridge-that-can-tell-you-when-you've-run-out-of-milk idiocy. Guess what - I can open the door and see for myself! Amazing!
Its the usual story of it can be done but nobody asking if it should - just like touchscreens in cars. useful for some things but not others. I particularly DON'T want to navigate a number of menus to turn on the feckin heater or switch radio channels when I'm doing 70mph when I can do the same with a button and don't even have to look!
Apple's co-processors designed to handle sensor data like this one describes are also called the M7 (and M8 now), I wonder if that's just a coincidence or have ARM named it after Apple or vice versa or perhaps they are made in conjunction with Apple?
EDIT: Wikipedia to the rescue! Apple's M7 is based off of the ARM M-3 chip, likely called the M7 because it was released at the same time as the Apple A7 CPU. And gosh they are tiny chips, 0.1mm square is nothing for such a useful chip.
> And gosh they are tiny chips, 0.1mm square is nothing for such a useful chip.
Worth noting that's just the CPU area _in_ the chip - not the whole chip. Someone will have to bolt on peripherals, bus, internal memories, pin out pads, etc to form the whole chip which an end developer would buy.
That said, in reality at the "small end" the logic gate area is significantly smaller than the area needed for pin out (I think the smallest I've seen is 2mm x 2mm, which was achieved by eschewing packaging and just dipping the silicon in a ceramic paint to insulate and protect it).
No, it isn't. The A7/A8 are based on Apple developed cores code named Cyclone, which was derived from the work on the A6 Swift core. They are rather more power efficient than the A57.
Like Qualcomm Apple have an architectural licence with ARM that allows them to design their own silicon providing it meets the ISA specs that ARM provide.
Doesnt matter how much more grunt you give them, CPU's are still wildly inefficient for this sort of 'intelligence' processing.
Considering how much the 'Internet of Things' relies on low-power processing, it is a red-flag that this regurgitated press release hasn't included extensive power usage figures or any kind of power use comparison.
The 'low power' part about the 'Internet of Things' comes into play in relation to the relatively long periods of inactivity such devices spend in low-power mode between bursts of activity. Sure, for a battery-powered mobile node the powered-up consumption is also important, but for an appliance permanently plugged into the mains - not so much. On the average, it will still consume exactly nothing if it 'sleeps' most all the time. And there's that other thing as well - even with power-conscious applications, it's not simply how much power you consume when active - it's also how long you need to stay active to get your stuff done (and a more powerful MCU can go back to sleep faster).
@Frankee
Yea, it's better times for pros, too. The market for embedded sw engineers, and especially those with some low power and/ or security knowledge, is looking quite rosy at present. Most good people have been sucked in and blown out of the mobile industry over the last few years. That's now a nightmare, as mobile races to the bottom.
But just recently, it's become clear that we may be able to avoid Linux just a bit longer...
Yea, it's better times for pros, too. The market for embedded sw engineers, and especially those with some low power and/ or security knowledge, is looking quite rosy at present IN CHINA. FTFY.
Unfortunately, "embedded" means by definition some sort of production of goods taking place, and as we know that kind of thing happens exclusively in China these days (and I'm talking about design too, not just the physical production itself). I certainly wish you were right though - I just don't see any sign of it whatsoever...
If you're really in the UK, in the embedded design business and unable to find work, then you must have done something badly wrong at some point.
From where I sit (in the UK, in the embedded design business), things are frantically busy, I turn work away all the time and all my uk-based subcontract manufacturers are flat-out.
and the low power part of IoT is also forms part of a focus point for investment in UK innovation. The government funded Technology Strategy Board (aka InnovateUK) has a £3.5m competition for funding business collaboration with the title 'Scaling up energy-efficient computing'.
https://www.innovateuk.org/competition-display-page/-/asset_publisher/RqEt2AKmEBhi/content/scaling-up-energy-efficient-computing
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