ARM Community: Living the mobile dream... sans laptop... in Barcelona - ARM Community

Last year when I attended MWC, I blogged about feeling like a teenager because of the social media explosion that I saw.

Perhaps this year I should have titled my blog..”Feeling like a kindergartner”, due to me attending the event without my laptop, my presentation security blanket. Let me explain. At every trade show, being the consummate marketing professional I have felt compelled to carry my laptop with me to have all my presentations at my disposal and the ability to edit them on the fly. But thanks to my handy iPhone I would spend most of my time on that device to stay connected on email etc. and my back and shoulders would feel the brunt of carrying around the heavy laptop, not to mention the anxiety of making sure it was charged, just in case I needed to whip out a presentation.

This MWC, I thought that I would a take a leap and live the mobile dream by living on the road with my iPad alone.

With the aid and advice of our two IT guys at the office, I set up a remote client on my iPad that would allow me to log in to my laptop connected to our work network and modify presentations and access data when needed, then downloaded GoodReader to enable the easy viewing of presentations and show guides.

As a result I have been shoulder pain and charging anxiety free. I think this is now going to be my modus operandi on the road. I can truly give a 1st person account of how ARM technology is making my life better.

As I wandered around MWC today I was trying to hone in on areas where ARM is helping to make life better and this is where the area of green technologies came to mind. A couple of astounding facts: 80% of all Base Stations OPEX comes from power consumption; 40% of new Base Station deployments will be off grid i.e. powered by alternate fuel sources like solar or wind power.

Operators are taking different approaches to deploying more energy efficient solutions and deploying more "small cells". The scalability of the ARM architecture I believe will allow our partners and OEMs to deliver energy efficient software compatible platforms from small to macro cell. In fact I was able to see a number of proof points around the show.

Our Partner Texas Instruments was demonstrating their small cell approach where the their Cortex-A8 based Integra CA8167 does the Layer 3 protocol processing and their Base Station SoC, the TCI6616 does the Layer 1&2 processing. This platform is designed to help Base Station customers jumpstart their time to market and energy efficient performance, in small cell development.



Another partner, Mindspeed Technologies is helping their customers solve some of these very open and power consumption challenges using a 6 core Cortex-A9 device. They believe that their solution will help Base Station OEMs reduce their processing power consumption by up to 50%. Mindspeed were demonstrating small cell Base Stations and in an impressively small form factor, pico Base station. See more on this YouTube clip:



Picochip was demonstrating an ARM11 dual-core based Local Area Base Station (LABS) that supports 32 channels of voice and HSPA data traffic. They told me that one of the key ARM technologies that they use is our security technologies called Trustzone. This allows them to deliver value added security features to operators.




So this led me to thinking.. ARM technology could help operators live their mobile dream of lower OPEX and scalable technology, just as it has helped me live mine by reducing my back pain and battery life anxiety.

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.