This post will elaborate how our business model delivers value to our direct customers who we call silicon partners. You will need to read the prior ARM Basics post for it to make complete sense.
As I mentioned earlier, our silicon partners effectively outsource their processor and corresponding ecosystem development to ARM.
It turns out that processor development is incredibly specialized and expensive work. Furthermore we spend a lot of money cultivating an ecosystem of tools, software, and other components necessary to develop complete systems – the ARM Connected Community has over 500 corporate participants to this end. Finally we spend a lot of precious time talking to nearly all the relevant industry participants to jointly map out the future – and there certainly are a lot of them (who don’t always agree).
All processor vendors need to do this in order to be successful. The key difference is that ARM amortizes all this investment across 14 billion units so far. This is truly compelling from a cost effectiveness standpoint.
This cost-effectiveness allows us to out-invest our direct competition. Fundamentally, we have and continue to develop better technology with leadership functionality.
The silicon partner (e.g. our customer) can focus on their core competency where they add the most value. My mother doesn’t really care which processor is inside her anti-lock brakes – she just wants them to perform, be reliable, and be cost effective. Our silicon partners can focus on what truly matters to the end user rather than wasting time reinventing the wheel.
To sum it up: our model is more cost effective, enables us to out-invest to develop leadership technology and functionality, and allows our customers to spend their time and resources where they add value. This ultimately helps the end user get more functionality, sooner, and cheaper.
Our silicon partners score win #1.
very good, but could you add some posts on what ARM will address in the future in terms of technology evolution.
Nowadays, the hottest topic about ARM-based Linux OS netbook, as we know, ARM processor is not powerful enough to handle such as Adobe Flash technology, so if rich its instructions to enable it, …..
By: Jackie on April 20, 2009
at 6:41 AM
Hi Jackie,
Thanks for the comment – I aim to have the content driven by interest so will indeed address this in future posts. I have a few more “ARM basics” in the development pipeline, but after that will head back to netbooks and such. Agreed there is a lot of interest there.
Eric.
By: eschorn on April 20, 2009
at 7:25 AM
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By: ARM basics 1 « Eric Schorn’s Processors for People Blog on September 8, 2009
at 4:52 AM