Artificial intelligence, autonomous cars, cloud services, wearables, new generations of smartphones and tablets, hybrid computers... ARM has its hands full, no doubt. The titan from Cambridge calculates sales of 100 billion chips in the next five years, and that means enormous differences in performance and energy consumption. ARM solved a good part of them with big.LITTLE, but new demands require a new architecture, and that brings us to DynamIQ.
The absolute majority of smartphones and tablets have an ARM chip inside. The same extends to an ever-growing number of routers. The Raspberry Pi itself, with 12.5 million units sold, based all its models on ARM technology. And honestly, it's not hard to see why. The hardware has an increasingly advanced performance-to-energy-efficiency ratio, its licenses are flexible, and the overall cost tends to be low. At the same time, we should also note that ARM virtually has no competition in the mobile space, but instead of stagnating, the company is already thinking about expanding. What does it have up its sleeve? Nothing less than a new architecture: DynamIQ.
What DynamIQ Brings to the Table
From a certain point of view, DynamIQ is the next evolutionary leap for big.LITTLE, a big bet on heterogeneous configurations and greater flexibility. Depending on customer needs, DynamIQ can deliver up to eight cores per node, with multiple variants. This means that under the same node, ARM has managed to combine cores associated with different families, which in turn breaks the original limits of big.LITTLE. Unfortunately, ARM didn't give too many technical details about those theoretical variants, but it did confirm that artificial intelligence will be a priority in DynamIQ (anticipating up to 50 times the performance in such applications), and that its cores will be controlled independently in voltage, frequency, and sleep state.
Needless to say, the potential of DynamIQ is gigantic. ARM expects to see the new architecture in autonomous cars and homes, deep learning platforms, and obviously, mobile devices. It will be very interesting to study the next generation of smartphones and tablets with much more exotic core configurations.
