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Dolphin7835
daleste
Freescale doesn't have to worry about getting bought. Too much debt.
Freescale eyes ARM server play
Peter Clarke
2/28/2013 6:20 AM EST
No end of Power
When asked if Freescale's licensing of A50-series meant that Freescale was in a process of phasing out its use of the PowerPC architecture Lowe was adamant it did not. "The Power architecture has proven itself at the high end. In 2013 85 percent of networking introductions are going to be Power architecture." The adoption of the latest ARM license is partly a response to customer requests, Lowe added.
And in automotive microcontrollers there is a similar story. Power is the 32-bit architecture for all but a few infotainment applications and Freescale has made 15-year supply agreements based on Power, along with road-mapping for its automotive customers.
There is also the potential as multicore architectures and virtualization become more mainstream of having ARM and Power cores working together, Lowe said.
Lowe said that with regard to manufacturing Freescale was happy with its fab-lite strategy. "The general rule is that at 90-nm and higher geometries we make it in-house. At 65-nm and smaller we outsource. For the microcontroller and analog business 90-nm is close to leading-edge technology. The percentage we outsource will grow over time."
However, when it was pointed out that increasingly large foundries will want to offer mixed-signal manufacturing capability for fabless companies to offer microcontrollers and other circuits in competition, Lowe said this was not a big threat right now.
"Analog is highly fragmented and there are many proprietary techniques and technologies. If you go to a foundry, you either have to move your process or they want you to use a standard process which involves compromise. Also analog involves 1,000s of tapeouts. The foundries don't like it."
Related links and articles:
www.freescale.com
News articles:
Freescale preps IoT attack with tiny MCU
Freescale attacks Cavium with security coprocessors
Freescale's i.MX 7 canned as firm refocuses
Freescale's financial losses widen
When asked if Freescale's licensing of A50-series meant that Freescale was in a process of phasing out its use of the PowerPC architecture Lowe was adamant it did not. "The Power architecture has proven itself at the high end. In 2013 85 percent of networking introductions are going to be Power architecture." The adoption of the latest ARM license is partly a response to customer requests, Lowe added.
And in automotive microcontrollers there is a similar story. Power is the 32-bit architecture for all but a few infotainment applications and Freescale has made 15-year supply agreements based on Power, along with road-mapping for its automotive customers.
There is also the potential as multicore architectures and virtualization become more mainstream of having ARM and Power cores working together, Lowe said.
Lowe said that with regard to manufacturing Freescale was happy with its fab-lite strategy. "The general rule is that at 90-nm and higher geometries we make it in-house. At 65-nm and smaller we outsource. For the microcontroller and analog business 90-nm is close to leading-edge technology. The percentage we outsource will grow over time."
However, when it was pointed out that increasingly large foundries will want to offer mixed-signal manufacturing capability for fabless companies to offer microcontrollers and other circuits in competition, Lowe said this was not a big threat right now.
"Analog is highly fragmented and there are many proprietary techniques and technologies. If you go to a foundry, you either have to move your process or they want you to use a standard process which involves compromise. Also analog involves 1,000s of tapeouts. The foundries don't like it."
Related links and articles:
www.freescale.com
News articles:
Freescale preps IoT attack with tiny MCU
Freescale attacks Cavium with security coprocessors
Freescale's i.MX 7 canned as firm refocuses
Freescale's financial losses widen
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eewiz
2/28/2013 11:00 AM EST
There are several startups/major companies in the ARM server space for a quite a while now. What's the USP that Freescale plan to offer?
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asic_pal
2/28/2013 2:01 PM EST
Good Question! To my knowledge there about 10 known companies working on ARM based Micro servers, I guess most likely performance per watt will be very close among all, it will be a tough market unless there is a key feature differentiation!
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ChipConnoisseur
2/28/2013 4:06 PM EST
Baidu has already decided to use ARM servers, although from Marvell:
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/02/28/baidu-deploys-marvell-arm-based-server/
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daleste
2/28/2013 10:23 PM EST
Freescale has some opportunities to grow in the server market. There are many competitors that will do their best to keep them out.
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iniewski
3/1/2013 10:44 AM EST
So what are differences between these 10 or so players in the micro server market? How many use ARM license?
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JeffL_2
3/1/2013 12:14 PM EST
I'm happy to see Freescale adopting the ARM ISA. One of the best outcomes would be to see Freescale merging some of their more valuable "legacy" IP with the newer architectures. IMHO one of their best features was the Time Processor Unit (TPU) which was available on the ColdFire processors and was also brought into the PowerPC uCs. If you've ever tried to write and support a complex application using the generic ARM timer you'd understand how much code development it really takes. If Freescale decides to start designing ARM uCs (and especially in it intends to de-emphasize PowerPC for these applications) it needs to seriously consider integrating TPUs into such an architecture, both for new designs and to support legacy code bases to give them a reasonable "upgrade" path.
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MikeSmith2011
3/1/2013 12:22 PM EST
Every ARM 50 licensee would have their eyes on this market. Other than AMD all the existing licensees have been embedded players so they are most likely intent on retaining or expanding their market share there. The server market is a huge lucrative space that they can target if that does take off so it appears to be a low risk approach.
The question on differentiation remains. In the embedded market that is in the SoC with the special accelerators etc. In the server space it is primarily about the CPU so while there will be slightly different variations to memory interfaces etc. they will most likely look alike. Which means the only differentiation will be on price - which makes the business folks at Dell/HP salivate at higher margins....
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DMcCunney
3/1/2013 1:20 PM EST
This doesn't really come as a surprise. We can't know whether Freescale will succeed in the ARM server market, but they can't realistically stay *out* of it. There are too many markets Freescale would like to be in where ARM is the architecture of choice, and if they want a piece of that market they offer ARM cores.
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joyhaa
3/3/2013 10:46 AM EST
AMCC has been doing that for a while, shifting from PPC towards ARM-server. FSL should have started this two years ago.Any, better later than never!
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help.fulguy
3/4/2013 1:06 PM EST
ARM has lost the power battle to Intel. None of the 10 ARM licensee will survive the next 4 years. They are all building this hype to get bought.
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daleste
3/4/2013 8:52 PM EST
Freescale doesn't have to worry about getting bought. Too much debt.
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Dolphin7835
3/27/2013 12:01 AM EDT
IEEE Computer Society of Santa Clara Valley presents on April 9th
"New ARM Architectures for Servers: 64 bit, Virtualization, and Energy Efficiency"
Speaker: Lakshmi Mandyam, Director of Server Systems and Ecosystem, ARM
Time: 6:30 PM (PT) Networking/Refreshments, 7:00 PM Presentation
Free, registration: http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/archives/new-arm-architectures-for-servers
Location: webcast (simulcast and on-demand), Cadence / Bldg 10, 2655 Seely Ave, San Jose, CA
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