While the Internet of Things is growing at an incredible pace the chip manufacturers which are competing for this new market segment are running into problems when trying to design chips to add to appliances. There is a balance which needs to be found between processing power and energy savings, the goal is to design very inexpensive chips which can run on microWatts of power but still be incorporate networked communication and sensors. The new Cortex-M7 is a 32-bit processor which is directly competing with 8 and 16 bit microcontrollers which provide far less features but also consume far less power. Does a smart light bulb really need to have a 32bit chip in it or will a lower cost MCU provide everything that is needed for the light to function? Intel's Quark is in a similar position, the processing power it is capable of could be a huge overkill compared to what the IoT product actually needs. The Register has made a good observation in this article, perhaps the Cortex M0 paired with an M4 or M7 when the application requires the extra horsepower is a good way for ARM to go in. Meanwhile, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 600 has been adopted to run an OS to control robots so don't think this market is going to get any less confusing in the near future.
"The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing an estimated five times more quickly than the overall embedded processing market, so it's no wonder chip suppliers are flocking to fit out connected cars, home gateways, wearables and streetlights as quickly as they can."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Microsoft's Asimov System To Monitor Users' Machines In Real Time @ Slashdot
- ARM teams with 1248 to launch Hyperweave gateway to 'IoT-enable' enterprises @ The Inquirer
- ARMs head Moonshot bodies: HP pops Applied Micro, TI chips into carts @ The Register
- Third patch brings more admin Shellshock for the battered and Bashed @ The Register
- Mining Bitcoins with Pencil and Paper @ Hack a Day
- How to Organize Your Linux File System for Clutter-Free Folders @ Linux.com
- Alien Isolation Community Preview event @ Kitguru
As long as I can, from my
As long as I can, from my PC/laptop/Tablet/ETC, wirelessly, or wired, ask and receive the extra processing power, from the light bulb, toaster, whatever IOT device, and have it help me speed up my rendering/other workloads, then fine by me. Hell multiplex the signal over the electrical wiring, and Wifi, for extra bandwidth, just give me any spare processing cycles, so include enough memory on the device to buffer the data flow, and host the rendering/other client software. If the whole house can be connected up and function as one big asymmetrical computing system/platform, go for it. I would so love to be able to handoff heavy computing workloads seamlessly among all of my computing devices, and have a truly asymmetrical computing OS that could manage the load balancing. Maybe in the future, you could be asked, what OS is your House running, or group of OSs, as long as the OSs were all asymmetrical multiprocessing aware, and could communicate in a standard protocol/VM way to spread the compute across all of the different devices, this is what HSA is about, and not just AMD’s version of HSA.
Please deluxe Toaster, help me run this game, or crunch these numbers, can you spare a few CPU/SOC processing cycles.
Great. Now my washing
Great. Now my washing machine can send spam, and my dining room light can run malware or contribute to DDoS attacks.
My things don’t need internet!
No keep all of that in a
No keep all of that in a locked down VM hosted on a separate firewall server than even the main household server, and isolated from the inside Internet, in fact the inside the house net can be of a different design altogether, and be made for communicating with the other household devices that do not need direct un-filtered outside internet connections. The inside the house protocol, can be made to encrypt, and encapsulate, any inside packets and only pass them the devices that need them, while any thing going to the outside can be sent back through the proxy/firewall/whatever, without any knowledge of the inner workings of the home’s secure intranet. The outside internet would not even be able to recognize the inside intranet’s protocol, it would appear to be garbled info useless for anything. The outermost layer firewall server would be responsible for filtering all the bad stuff out, before passing the data on to the household server, and the data link could also be made custom between the firewall server and the household server, with another custom layer protocol that only the firewall server, and the household server would understand, every thing encrypted and randomized, down to the household IOT internal addresses. That should keep the NSA, and Russian Mafia at bay for a good while. Even the wireless protocol could be custom, with a little randomization, and such. The biggest threat, would be any custom spying hardware, and firmware built into the devices, but bugs have always been a problem, maybe some custom extra randomization hardware inside the connection network/wifi signal receivers/cards that come from a separate source, as the device manufacturer, but things could get very spy vs spy comical and cost too much. You can only go so far with those NSA types, and they could always slip a mickey into your drink and take you to the Island.
I can’t wait for a condom
I can’t wait for a condom with a multi-vibration capability.