The Arm DevSummit 2021 Keynote Live Blog: 8am PT (15:00 UTC)

This week seems to be Arm's week across the tech industry. Following yesterday's Arm SoC announcements from Apple, today sees Arm kick off their 2021 developer's summit, aptly named DevSummit. As always, the show is opening up with a keynote being delivered by Arm CEO Simon Segars, who will be using the opportunity to lay out Arm's vision of the future.

Arm chips are already in everything from toasters to PCs – and Arm isn't stopping there. So be sure to join us at 8am PT (15:00 UTC) for our live blog coverage of Arm's keynote.

10:57AM EDT - We're here for this year's Arm developer summit keynote

10:58AM EDT - Like pretty much everything else this year, this is once again a virtual show in light of the coronavirus pandemic

10:58AM EDT - So Arm's schedule and content is tweaked a bit to account from that

10:59AM EDT - Arm is not unique in this, but the switch to virtual shows means that there's a much greater focus on videos that are produced ahead of time

11:00AM EDT - Which means keynotes have been going from just talk-and-applause to more flashier, Apple-like presentations

11:00AM EDT - And here we go

11:01AM EDT - Starting with a pre-roll video

11:01AM EDT - 200 billion Arm-based chips have been deployed

11:03AM EDT - Oh, no, apparently that was a fake-out. The stream hosts are talking for a bit, before Simon's keynote actually gets started

11:03AM EDT - Okay, *now* here we go

11:03AM EDT - And here's Simon

11:04AM EDT - Simon is starting off with a focus on the convergence of both the hardware and software ecosystems

11:05AM EDT - Simon is recapping his own history with computing and how he got started

11:05AM EDT - Back in the days of the Sinclair ZX81 and its 1KB of memory

11:06AM EDT - Simon is thanking Sinclair himself for inspiring a generation of techies

11:07AM EDT - Simon eventually went on to become an EE, and joining Arm

11:08AM EDT - Continuing the walk down memory lane, Simon is now recapping the first embedded in-circuit emulation capabilities that were added to Arm in the 90s

11:08AM EDT - And ultimately, the steps needed to have a CPU become a building block of a bigger chip

11:09AM EDT - "At our core, we're an engineering-focused organization"

11:09AM EDT - Now on to the not-too-distant future

11:10AM EDT - Armv9 will be the core of Arm's next decade of computing IP. It's already shipping, and will show up in more and more IP and chips as time goes on

11:10AM EDT - Arm designed Armv9 to run the full spectrum of compute, from HPC down to micro sensors

11:11AM EDT - While also helping developers innovate on top of Arm's own IP

11:11AM EDT - And of course, all of this saves time for chip design

11:12AM EDT - Meanwhile, security and cyberattacks remain an ongoing issue for the world and for the tech industry building this hardware

11:13AM EDT - Addressing this problem requires fundamentally rethinking matters

11:14AM EDT - Simon believes that Arm shares in the responsibility for improving security

11:14AM EDT - One such step Arm is taking is with Confidential Compute support in Armv9

11:15AM EDT - Moving on to the subject of decarbonization

11:15AM EDT - Arm is committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2023

11:16AM EDT - And of course, Arm's focus on energy efficiency is a way to help reduce power consumption (and thus CO2 generation)

11:17AM EDT - And now a short testimonial from CloudFlare and why they use Arm

11:18AM EDT - Moving on again to the changing nature of workloads. Starting with IoT

11:19AM EDT - Simon is discussing one such example of a power line sensor that can detect if a line is damaged

11:20AM EDT - Arm this week has announced Arm Total Solutions for IoT

11:20AM EDT - 5G is another focus area for Arm

11:20AM EDT - Arm is expecting a lot more than just handsets to be attached to 5G networks

11:21AM EDT - Including the pieces necessary to further push edge computing

11:21AM EDT - Arm is announcing the Arm 5G Solutions Lab to help develop the future of Arm-powered 5G hardware

11:22AM EDT - What does Arm think is the most important technology of the next 50 years? AI

11:22AM EDT - "AI is entering a new stage of development"

11:23AM EDT - Arm expects AI to "enhance the full spectrum of computing"

11:23AM EDT - The first devices incorporating Arm Ethos AI accelerators are starting to ship

11:24AM EDT - Now a word on the Arm-NVIDIA merger

11:25AM EDT - Simon thinks the combination of the two companies will be in a good position to tackle the future of AI

11:25AM EDT - Arm's focus for the future will be supplying the tools needed to help hardware and software developers develop AI systems in a quick and efficient manner

11:26AM EDT - "Our purpose is to unlock the power of technology"

11:27AM EDT - And that's a wrap from Simon. Arm's VP of IoT, Mohamed Awad, is up in a moment

11:28AM EDT - Simon's keynote was just under 30 minutes, so there's a couple of minutes of talking heads here before Awad's presentation starts

11:32AM EDT - And here's Mohamed Awad, with a presentation titled "Designing with Systems in Mind"

11:33AM EDT - Starting things off with robots

11:34AM EDT - Recapping Asimov's 3 laws of robotics

11:34AM EDT - And what modern laws look like

11:35AM EDT - Slowly, science fiction about robotics will become less fictional

11:36AM EDT - How Arm brings up systems, from definition and design to the final hardware development

11:37AM EDT - With Arm providing the tools

11:37AM EDT - These days Arm technology is baked into a immense number of specialized mobile devices

11:38AM EDT - One area Arm is looking to improve the capabilities of mobile hardware is with their Memory Tagging Extensions for developers, to help them secure their software

11:38AM EDT - And what Arm has learned in mobile they are applying to infrastructure

11:39AM EDT - For Neoverse, Arm has not only worked on scaling up for cores, but also how those cores will be connected to other hardware, and how developers will create software for them

11:41AM EDT - "Establishing Arm in the cloud hasn't been easy"

11:41AM EDT - Awad credits designing things with a focus on whole systems as helping them to break into the cloud market

11:42AM EDT - "It's intelligence that will enable IoT to boost productivity"

11:42AM EDT - "We must be honest about how hard it is to build IoT systems today"

11:43AM EDT - "These systems are complex and massively fragmented"

11:43AM EDT - So Arm aims to help simplify the process

11:43AM EDT - Such as Project Cassini

11:44AM EDT - Arm has kicked off a related initiative: Project Centauri, a similar initiative for M-class systems

11:45AM EDT - Arm partners shipped over 25B chips last year

11:45AM EDT - Arm is doubling down on Corstone

11:45AM EDT - Which will further help to accelerate SoC development times

11:46AM EDT - One of Arm's customers, Alif, was able to achieve over an 800x performance improvement in ML versus their past M-class design

11:47AM EDT - Now on to Arm Total Solutions for IoT, which was formally announced yesterday

11:48AM EDT - Arm Virtual Hardware: develop on virtual hardware to deploy to physical hardware

11:48AM EDT - Basically, an even greater focus on developing inside of a simulator

11:49AM EDT - Arm partners are already using virtual hardware for their development processes

11:49AM EDT - Including Amazon Lab126 and Himax

11:50AM EDT - And now a short testamonial from AWS about using simulations for development

11:52AM EDT - And Google's TensorFlow Mobile group

11:53AM EDT - By making the virtual hardware available when the corstone is available, it allows software and hardware developers to get started right away, without waiting for silicon

11:54AM EDT - "We're fully committing to this Total Solutions approach"

11:54AM EDT - And that extends into Arm's IoT roadmap

11:54AM EDT - Virtual hardware will be available at no cost while it's in beta

11:55AM EDT - Arm believes this will take years off of product design cycles

11:55AM EDT - And that's a wrap. Thank you for joining us.