ARM Community: Design West (ESC) Day 1: Optimizing Your Software on ARM - ARM Community

It was a full first day at the ESC Summit of Design West. I spent most of the time doing what I love to do best: talking with ARM Partners. Most of the conversations focused on how engineers can achieve better software on their ARM processor-based SoCs.

Andy Frame had a few meetings in the morning so he passed the baton (microphone) to me so I can share some of the insights with the ARMFlix followers. I’m looking forward to Day 2 and speaking with more of the ARM Partners at ESC (check out our handy map). Don’t miss the ARM Connected Community Theatre at booth 1127. It was hoppin’ yesterday. More must sees are in my pre-ESC blog.

My show started with a conversation with Simon Davidmann of Imperas. He shared why software virtual prototypes are being used more now - what they are, and what ARM models and tools make up the Imperas solution. Imperas is one of the Partners in the ARM Connected Community pavilion.



Jem Davies of ARM talked with us prior to his participation in the Multicore Panel, How Many Cores Does it Take to Reach the Singularity? Jem’s impressions from the panel were “it went well and was great fun. A number of people wanted to know when the singularity (the point at which machines are smarter than humans) would arrive. Pradeep from Intel who is a big fan of the “big data” approach to the problem was very keen on building Exascale supercomputers (with associated power stations) to solve the problem, but I was more interested in when we can have portable devices with such capabilities. Given that with ARM’s Mali-T658 we already have around 300 GFLOPS of computational capability, this isn’t actually that far off. I think we all agreed with my assertion that it really depended on what problem domain we were referring to, and that within certain domains we were there already. However, a machine that thinks about thinking or even one that can reflect on the process of thinking about thinking was a way off yet. Oh, and our software colleagues have most of the heavy lifting to do…” Check out Jem’s impressions prior to the panel; learn more about why ARM is investing in graphics, and what the near future holds for ARM Mali GPUs.




At the ARM booth I chatted with Ronan Synnott about the latest ARM tool solution, DS-5. He shared how easy debugging can be, even multicore, on a Freescale i.MX6 quad-core ARM Cortex^TM-A9 board. The tool supports Linux and Android environments and the demo shows a Linux example.



Ronan also, shared his thoughts about ARM’s Streamline tool. DS-5 now supports both CPU and GPU profiling. The Android-based demo shows power gauging on a Samsung based tablet and phone which are made with Samsung Exynos 4210 chips. These Exynos chips have a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9, ARM Mali^TM-400 MP4 GPU and ARM Artisan Advanced Physical IP based on the Samsung Foundry 45nm low power HKMG process technology.



Ronan encouraged me to go to the Xilinx booth 1708 to see the latest in debugging with an SoC and FPGA. The Zynq-7000, a dual core Cortex-A9, is being demoed with the DS-5 tool to showcase how flexible complex debugging can be on the unique Xilinx environment. Check out the product that won the ACE Ultimate Product award for excellence in engineering in the SoC category.



I headed back to the ARM booth to end my morning with Jim Davis from Cypress Semiconductor, also a partner at the ARM Connected Community pavilion. Jim shared in a theater talk and demo why MCUs Can’t and PSoC Can. Jim discusses the flexibility that programmable SoCs offer and why this successful product moved to support Cortex-M3.



Don’t worry, your favorite roving reporter Andy was back in full force all afternoon (his blog) while I headed to find more ARM partner solutions.

Did I miss something? Tell us!
With all the ARM technology-based activities that are happening at Design West, our blogs can’t cover everything. Let us know what we missed through comments below, emailing the team (connected@arm.com), via @ARMCommunity Twitter or stop me at the show in the San Jose Convention Center. Stay tuned for more news.

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.)