ARM Community: Freescale - "Networking" with the ARM ecosystem - ARM Community

I woke up to some great news from our partner Freescale on their adoption of our multi-core ARM Cortex^TM-A7 and Cortex^TM-A15 for their next-generation networking architecture called Layerscape. This was exhilarating for me both on a professional and personal level, kind of icing on the cake for all the exciting news around ARM in Enterprise so far this year. For the past few years, I have been working with ARM partners to help them drive Enterprise applications, including wireless infrastructure and enterprise networking, with new and exciting ARM technology. But in my past life, I worked at Freescale driving Power-based products into this same arena. Today, with the announcement that my former colleagues at Freescale have adopted ARM processor-based products for networking, I feel like I have come full circle.

Networking and telecommunication OEMs are starting to feel the pinch of power consumption on the one hand and the economic crunch of R&D dollars on the other. With more and more services being added and requested by their IT and operator customers, they want to be able to rapidly deploy energy-efficient, scalable, flexible and configurable architectures on open-source platforms, that leverage common investments across the industry. This allows them to spend their R&D dollars on more value-added features and services rather than on fundamental building blocks.

So as they look to their future, they need to invest in an architecture that will we be vibrant, broadly adopted, and well embraced by both hardware and software developers. Clearly, billions of ARM technology-based devices, millions of ARM conversant developers and power consumption in mW vs. MW have tipped the balance in favor of the ARM architecture.

Freescale’s QorIQ products have long been successful in the networking space. The addition of ARM based products to augment Freescale’s product portfolio allows them to expand their reach, leveraging their networking expertise and our broad ecosystem. And we look forward to “Networking” with them.

Lakshmi Mandyam, Director of Server Systems & Ecosystem, ARM, is thrilled to be working on products and technologies that she can excitedly point to when she is out and about with her family. At ARM she is delighted to be able to change people’s perceptions about being able to deliver high performance enterprise solutions in a energy efficient mobile power profile.