A robot plays spot-the-ball at Embedded World, processed by ARM and Nvidia Kepler on a GE single-board computer
Low power consumption means ARM processors are making headway into the single-board industrial computer market, even as Intel, AMD and Via make lower power x86 chips. Cost, performance, and virtualisation are other parameters affecting adoption.
GE Intelligent Platforms (formerly Radstone) makes both Intel and ARM-based single board computers (SBCs), and is selling them into vision-based object identification and tracking, where heavy number-crunching is done on Nvidia Kepler graphics cores.
“You can have a discrete Nvidia GPU with 384 Kepler cores and an Intel Core i7 for 100W, and you can get an Nvidia Tegra K1 with quad ARM Cortex-A15s and 192 Kepler GPU cores for 10W: less performance but more Gflop/W, so better for mobile,” GE product manager Simon Collins told Electronics Weekly. “For a lot of customers, they can’t tell the difference between Intel or ARM solutions as they are [GPU] source code compatible, so ARM is a deliberate choice because it enables low power.”
SBC-maker Congatec sees x86 boards as the only choice at the high-performance end of the market, and ARM as the only choice at the lowest power end.
“There is performance overlap, the low end of Atom overlaps the high end of ARM” said Congatec marketing director Christian Eder. Infuture, the overlap will grow. “Quark will take Intel to lower power, and Cortex-A53 and A57 will take ARM higher in performance,” he said.
Swapping from Intel to ARM, warns Congatec sales manager Neil Wood, requires a specific kind of engineer as there is less support around for ARM – fewer downloadable drivers, for example, and boot-loaders that need tweeking compared with x86 BIOSs which have everything from scratch.
“From sales point of view, ARM has power and cost advantages. But a buyer has to have ARM-knowledgeable engineers,” said Wood. “Customers with x86 expertise go to ARM to reduce cost, and then there is a learning curve, and some go back to x86 because of the cost of engineering.”
A disappearing barrier to ARM use in SBCs is lack of proper hardware virtualisation, which is increasingly needed in embedded applications, according to Robert Day, v-p marketing at real-time operating system (RTOS) company Lynx, which has just ported its LynxOS hard RTOS and LynxSecure kernel hypervisor to ARM.
“The embedded world has been slow in embracing virtualisation as it didn’t need to support multiple operating systems. The most comprehensive virtualisation support was on Intel. Cortex-A15 was the first ARM to have proper virtualisation, followed by 64bit Cortex-A5x. Now the latest ARM and Intel have similar degree of vistualisation,” said Day, adding that PowerPC QorIQ bought vistualisation to embedded SBCs five or six years ago.
Day also councils the use of multiple cores to ease the use of more than one operating system. “A hypervisor needs virtualisation and multiple cores. Running a hypervisor on single core is possible, but it is kind of hard work,” he said.
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