ARM Community: ARM TechCon: ARM CTO Announces ARMv8 Architecture, UN, Rubik's Cube & Growth - ARM Community

David Blaza of UBM started ARM TechCon Day 3 confirming the growth we’ve been feeling with data from the overflowing parking lots, standing room only technical sessions and 2 days of crowded expo exhibits from the ARM Connected Community: attendance midday on Wednesday exceeded the entire show attendance of 2010. He continued with presenting some best in show awards including best product to Raspberry Pi just who described it: we are *beyond* proud.

2020 in 26 easy steps including a new architecture
Day 3 continued with a bang with an entertaining and insightful keynote by Mike Muller, ARM’s CTO. Muller used words from A through Z (a couple a little contrived) to show his vision for 2020. The main takeaway for me being that we are now working in energy constrained systems, whether they are phones or data centers. With a predicted improvement of only 2.2x battery capacity over that timeframe, the only way to deliver the required consumer functionality with all day battery life is to move to heterogeneous processor configurations, featuring big.LITTLE configurations, GPU and video acceleration engines. Muller also used the venue to announce a new instruction set, v8, which supports a 64-bit ARM instruction set for the first time.

UN’s vision for a brighter future
Everyone associates ARM with the energy efficiency of its technology but today's keynote speaker, Ole Hansen, Head of UN Global Compact LEAD, explained the potential for microprocessors to improve the efficiency of all sectors. Talking about the UN's new programs focusing on energy issues, Hansen described how vital it was for the technology sector to recognize the opportunity it has to make a major contribution to the reduction of greenhouse gases and improve global energy efficiency across every sector by helping to make systems smarter. In many sectors the gains to be made are significant - between 40% and 80% by using smart energy management. As a member of UN LEAD, ARM is collaborating with other companies to promote the transition to smart energy systems and renewable sources of energy. Hear more details from a video interview following Hansen’s keynote.



CubeStormer II: the designers’ view
The ARMFlix videos continued with Katie Morgan watching the CubeStormer II live in action and chatting with the designers David Gilday and Mike Dobson about their incredible partnership: what the key changes were from previous solutions, main technology differences and what has meant the most to them.



CubeStormer II: thoughts from Tom Rokicki of “God’s Number” fame
David Gilday caught up with Tom Rokicki, who helped to prove that all positions of the Rubik's Cube can be solved in 20 moves or fewer which is known as "God's Number". Tom shared his thoughts on the amazing speed of the CubeStormer II.



Synopsys transaction-level models and Virtualizer help customers
ARM recently announced a transaction-level models collaboration agreement with Synopsys. Katie discussed with Tom De Schutter, senior product marketing manager at Synopsys, how the combination of ARM Fast Models and Synopsys TLM Libraries in Virtualizer help joint customers to pull in their software development schedules.



Other Partner News
ARM Partners also had several key announcements today that garnered quite a bit of independent coverage:

STMicroelectronics Begins Shipping STM32F4 Fast-Track Design Tool to Distribution Partners

ARM Partners with SiXiTS to Bring Showcase Title “EON Sky: Alexa Bllom And The Lost City of Moons” to ARM Mali GPU-Based Mobile Devices

AppliedMicro Revitalizes the Cloud with World's First 64-bit ARM Architecture Compliant Processor Converging Compute Performance with Power Efficiency


Make sure you visit the ARM TechCon 2011 Video Playlist on ARM’s YouTube channel (ARMFlix) to view all our onsite interviews. More will be posted over the next week.

In case you missed our earlier coverage, catch up on ARM TechCon through our blogs:

• ARM Partner Collaboration in Full Force at Chip Design Day, ARM TechCon 2011
• ARM Software: Oracle's Java, Embedded SW Store with Avnet, Mentor Graphics & Xilinx
• Breadth of ARM Ecosystem Demonstrated at Software and System Design Day
• ARM Embedded Success: Freescale, NXP, ST, TI & Record Breaking Rubik’s Cube
• Smart Glasses, Bionic Birds, and GPS Goggles at ARM TechCon
• Dawn of Energy Efficient High Performance Computing at SC11

Stay tuned for more blogs and videos next week wrapping up ARM TechCon.

Did we miss your favorite part?

Lori Kate Smith, Sr. Manager Community Programs, ARM, has the best job at ARM because she gets to work with ARM Partners developing programs that enable broader support for the ARM architecture in her role of managing the ARM Connected Community. She’s passionate about creating communities where engineers can share information, find answers to their questions and talk about cool technologies. Prior to ARM, Lori Kate spent time in multiple different industries including EDA (Cadence, Verisity, Axis Systems), Enterprise Software and dot bomb (HelloBrain), and wireless (Metricom (Ricochet), AT&T, and MCCaw Cellular equally splitting her time between every marketing and buz dev role you can imagine and major account sales. If there’s a new technology to launch or sell, she’s game. Lori Kate even managed to get a few degrees at Santa Clara University (MBA) and Middlebury College (BA.)