ARM is spreading into Windows PCs and the edge of the internet

Thanks to ARM’s domination of smartphones, the company and its customers have shipped 120 billion chips to date. But there’s a big opportunity in the expanding internet of things, or making everyday objects smart and connected. As those devices become interoperable and voice-controlled, they need more computing power. And ARM is making sure that its processors are used to provide it.

Over time, the goal of ARM’s new owner, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, is to create the artificial intelligence needed for the Singularity, or the day when collective machine intelligence is greater than that of collective human intelligence. ARM’s job is to push AI into the edge of the network, where the company’s small, power-efficient chips are a natural choice. But it is also pushing into servers, where Intel has a newfound vulnerability, and into Windows 10 computers, which now work with ARM chips.

From our standpoint it’s a huge opportunity for us, because we also see — this is a big 2018 initiative. The rush of compute moving to the edge and the need to do more and more local processing, less dependent on the cloud to do every bit of the processing piece. That’s just going to go off and accelerate, particularly as devices learn, in the context of the machine learning piece. The profile for what the learning algorithm looks like for your own devices, the performance and benefits you get as that’s more personalized and done locally, that will be pretty huge. We’re seeing an uptick there.

Different countries have different laws and bars in terms of threats and the like.

Because China has so much control — talking about mobile, all the carriers in China are state-run. Getting an illegal SIM card is very hard. Fraud is prevented by your identity, your mobile number. As a result, mobile payments are ubiquitous in China. In North America we’re way behind. But a lot of it has to do with the way payments are set up, the relationships between banks and so on.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in China. The government has such tight controls on monetary issues. I lived in China for a couple of years, so I lived through this. Taking money out of the country is really hard. But now, with Tencent and Alibaba as really large merchants, the government can’t see where all the money is going, particularly if it travels outside of China. They’re already getting their nose into trying to take partial ownership of these companies.

Primarily we’re focused on edge compute. When we think about blockchain and the things required around security and local processing, it’s all about power and area. Machine learning is a big spot there for us, because you’ll need to do some level of neural network processing to handle the data. Whether a GPU is the right thing — if you’re putting it in an edge device, power is a big issue. Solving those issues in the cloud, one way would be GPUs, but for us, it’s more about the edge. We’re looking at all kinds of different architectural methodologies there. Nothing we’re talking about publicly yet.

It’s a big focus. You’ve seen him speak. He talks about 300-year plans. He has a long time horizon. He’s definitely a big thinker. No question about that.

There’s a video of Softbank World, where he had a number of the companies on stage — Boston Dynamics, ARM, and so on. One of the benefits of being part of the Softbank ecosystem is just the interaction we get with the portfolio companies involved with Softbank. It isn’t a situation where we’re encouraged to work more closely with companies in the portfolio, but on the flip side, this whole notion of singularity, of a broader ecosystem working together, where the human brain and the artificial brain become one, or the artificial brain passes the human brain — realizing that vision, there are a lot of benefits to being under the Softbank umbrella. It’s an exciting time.