Soon, millions of agricultural sensors will be able to determine how much fertilizer, insecticide and water each plant should receive, all without being connected to the cloud.
That’s the big ambition for two new processors from ARM Holding, the British semiconductor design firm that helped companies like Apple (AAPL) and Samsung make smartphones ubiquitous.
It’s a game-changing development. One investors should not miss.
ARM is an important business as it played a key role in the development of smartphones as we know them today. Smartphones were revolutionary because they miniaturized full-scale computing. In addition to Wi-Fi and later Bluetooth radios and sensors, they had memory, storage, graphics and computer processors all made to fit in a handheld device.
Related post: Beautiful New Galaxy Phones Garner Buzz, Not Business
The challenge was power management. So, the engineers at ARM came up with an innovative architecture that placed most of the components of the system on single chip.
The ARM Cortex A series SoC architecture finally made mobile computing possible.
ARM is privately owned. So, the most interesting development for investors was that ARM had no interest in making its own chips. Rather, the company licensed its intellectual property to all takers. Samsung, Texas Instruments (TXN), Nvidia (NVDA), Qualcomm (QCOM), Apple and almost all Asian semiconductor companies were fast converts.
This gave investors a chance to get in and profit from ARM’s historic breakthrough. And it’s what will give you the chance to do so for this next cutting-edge move.
The new challenge is edge computing, the idea of moving processing from cloud-based data centers to the edge of networks.
Related post: Exploring the Edge: AWS, Microsoft Boldly Go Where No Service Has Before
The company announced in October 2019 that 150 billion chips with ARM IP had been shipped. And with Intel’s 2016 exit from the smartphone chip market, AMR is the only player in mobile.
Two new chips, the ARM Cortex M-55, and the ARM Ethos U-55, have been designed as part of a wider Internet of Things rollout. The M-55 will give low-cost sensors simple computational capability.
That alone is a huge upgrade over the current crop of dumb devices. However, when paired with the U-55, the combination can run real-time neural networks, a form of AI, on a smartphone.
ARM is calling the package a microNPU, or neural processing unit.
This idea is huge. It means tiny inexpensive sensors will get brains. They will be able to function in the field, independent of cloud networks.
This has the potential to speed up the development of self-driving cars, smart cities and factories and agriculture technology. It’s also the first true step toward edge computing.
The news media is full of AI stories with negative narratives: robots stealing human jobs, driverless cars running over innocent pedestrians, etc.
But smarter, low-cost sensors have the potential to produce great, safe results.
Given the scale of ARM, and its wide array of partners, the technology is expected to proliferate quickly.
The M-55 and U-55 have been licensed to customers for shipment in 2021. Thus far, the firms involved have not been disclosed, however Fortune notes that Samsung, ST Microelectronics (STM) and NXP Semiconductor (NXPI) have been early adopters of AI-specific IP in the past.
It’s too early to know what companies will benefit first from ARM’s newest chip design. When I have more insight, I will let you know right here.
Best wishes,
Jon D. Markman
