ARM to buy SensiNode in M2M play
ARM wants to extend its success in mobile devices to the Internet of Things. The company is buying Finland’s SensiNode Oy, a developer of software that helps connect low-cost, low power devices to the Internet. ARM says that the markets it hopes to address include wireless sensors, smart connected appliances, home health applications, and wearable electronics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
ARM founded the mbed project to help developers create useful applications for embedded processors. It says that mbed will now be able to take full advantage of SensiNode’s NanoStack and NanoService solutions. The company notes that IMS Research is predicting 30 billion connected devices by 2020.
Imagination Technologies expands partnership with Mentor Graphics
ARM’s British neighbor and competitor Imagination Technologies today announced an expanded agreement with Mentor Graphics. As a result of this extended collaboration, Mentor Graphics will support Imagination’s new “Warrior” CPU cores. The Warrior architecture is a direct challenger to ARM’s CPU cores. Like ARM, Imagination will produce cores based on the low power, high-speed RISC architecture that has proven to be so well-suited for smartphones and tablets.
Imagination says Mentor Graphics will support Warrior with its Sourcery CodeBench development tools. “Open source tools and technologies like Sourcery CodeBench are key drivers for proliferation of our IP,” said Amit Rohatgi, vp of marketing at Imagination. “We will continue to work closely together with Mentor to optimize the toolchain and included components which will deliver added functionality and improved performance for new and existing MIPS cores.”
Mobile drives microprocessor market growth
IC Insights is boosting its sales forecast for microprocessors used in tablets, and trimming its forecast for those used in mobile phones. But phones will still account for more than a quarter of the estimated $61 billion microprocessor market. The PC, server and mainframe markets are set to account for more than half of this year’s microprocessor revenue, but that share is slipping.
Tablets account for just 6% of the market, but the share is growing quickly. Sales of microprocessors for tablets are projected to grow 54% this year to almost $3.5 billion, while sales of microprocessors for mobile phones are projected to grow 30% to $16.1 billion. At the start of this year, sales of mobile processors for tablets and phones were forecast to grow 50% and 28%, respectively. The IC Insights researchers say that overall microprocessor sales are now expected to increase 8% in 2013 after rising just 2% in 2012. The research does not include GPUs or baseband processors.
