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by Peter Dzwig
ARM are always a company worth noting, if only because they dominate a market sector (processors for mobile devices) even more completely than Intel dominate the PC market. According to figures currently being bandied about, ARM hold in excess of 95% of the current mobile market. According to some that goes as high as 98%. What is perhaps an even more important measure of that dominance is that most handsets have 2–3 ARM processors. That is real market dominance.
Companies such as NVIDIA, Qualcomm and others are using ARM's processors to move the market for netbooks and notebooks ahead. This is an area in which Intel sees itself and its Atom as having a natural dominance. That is clearly not the way that ARM and its collaborators anticipate that things will turn out.
A few days ago, ARM had its annual technology meeting in “The Valley” around which clustered a number of announcements. Perhaps the most interesting for us was the link between ARM and FPGA manufacturer Xilinx. The collaboration owes a lot to the finalisation, or near finalisation, of the AMBA bus specification. Xilinx can now see – and are keen to tell the world – how the combination of FPGAs, ARM's Cortex and AMBA fit together and how AMBA may become a solution for on-board FPGA communications. AMBA is not an ARM.
While AMBA is almost thirteen years old it has now reached a level of maturity where it is now seen as a product capable of delivering pretty much everything that an embedded designer is looking for. In that respect at least it is regarded by many as the de facto 32-bit embedded standard.