Ask the Experts: Krisztián Flautner VP of R&D, ARM
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 3, 2014 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Arm
- Ask the Experts
- SoCs
Late last year we did an installment of Ask the Experts with ARM's Peter Greenhalgh, lead architect for the Cortex A53. The whole thing went so well, in no small part to your awesome questions, that ARM is giving us direct access to a few more key folks over the coming months.
Krisztián Flautner is Vice President of Research and Development at ARM, and as you can guess - he's focused on not the near term, but what's coming down the road for ARM. ARM recently celebrated its 50 billionth CPU shipment via its partners, well Krisztián is more focused on the technologies that will drive the next 100 billion shipments.
Krisztián holds PhD, MSE and BSE degrees in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan. He leads a global team that researches everything from circuits to processor/system architectures and even devices. And he's here to answer your questions.
If there's anything you want to ask the VP of R&D at ARM, this is your chance. Leave a comment with your question and Krisztián will go through and answer any he's able to answer. If you've got questions about process tech, Moore's Law, ARM's technology roadmap planning or pretty much anything about where ARM is going, ask away!
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
62 Comments
View All Comments
lada - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
What security measures does ARM have against industrial espionage and the now infamous NSA meddling with firmwares, software and anything computing related? Have ARM HQ been infiltrated? Are ARM designs safe, or contain some hardware "backdoors" for i.e. elevating rights (userspace to kernel, TrustZone, etc.) ? Are sources of ARM processors open to security audits? Does ARM do security audit on its own? Are sources versioned in a way that would detect "hacks" - changes(backdoors) to the sources ?And vice versa, does ARM have access to partners' IP that means third party ARM processors sources, or modified commodity ARM designs? To review them for security purposes?
These are all questions I've always wished to ask.
mercurylife - Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - link
+1Good Question
Krysto - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
I've asked that before, and ARM doesn't seem interested in answering it. Shame.Netmsm - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
HelloWould You state Your opinion about evolution of x86 ARM embedded devices? What is Your analysis about that? Is this showing that in future at long term, ARM won't be able to compete with x86 in terms of response to market needs? Or not, and embedding ARM in x86 based processors is a competiton advantage solely?
Thanks
Jonathan_Rung - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
Hello! Compared to the great tech-savvy questions posed here, this may be a little too... mainstream to warrant your attention, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!About four years ago, Intel's attempts to cut into the consumer SoC market amounted to a big flop, but sometime around the release of the Razr i, they seemed to be getting their act together. More recently, the Intel Celeron 2955U is arguably the best choice for Chromebooks when considering the dual and quad Exynos alternatives. As we've seen with Haswell, it's clear that Intel is really focused on improving their mobile processors as consumers gravitate towards mobile products and ARM eats up marketshare. Assuming Intel and AMD continue to prioritize low voltage/thermally constrained consumer devices, will ARM eventually yield to Intel/AMD in the mobile OS space and focus on embedded (boring) systems? I think ARM SoCs are still clearly the best choice for smartphones, but in about four years time, Intel's ability to compete in the mobile OS space has gone from "complete joke" to "somewhat viable." The Cortex-A50 series sounds great and I can't wait, and I know that nobody can predict the future, but what's your best guess for five, ten years down the line?
KFlautner - Thursday, June 5, 2014 - link
We don't have any intentions on giving up on the mobile market. ;) What you see playing out with competitive offerings is not really about technology but about business models: ARM is a much lower-cost ecosystem-based play, not an old-school high-margin vertical. I've placed my bets on which one I think will win long term. ;)Jonathan_Rung - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
Thank you for responding!Factory Factory - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
Lately we've seen CPUs and GPUs looked at for different general compute tasks - CPUs for latency-sensitive, complex, and/or single-threaded calculations and GPUs for throughput-based, shallow, highly-threaded calculations. Is there a third type of processor with a different balance of deep vs. wide, or perhaps one going in a different direction altogether, that you see becoming more relevant in the future?KFlautner - Thursday, June 5, 2014 - link
There are some interesting new workloads that are becoming relevant and some of these may warrant specific architectural support and/or new microarchitectures. An area I find interesting from an architecture point-of-view is machine learning. But we'll need some time for the algorithms to settle before we'd design in too much deep support for new workloads.Jaybus - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link
Are you talking about adding neurosynaptic cores alongside ARMv8 cores? Sort of a right-brain to go with the current left-brain? I know IBM Research has talked of going in that direction as well.