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The chip firm is introducing three new parts for servers. One is a more muscular core aimed at the traditional enterprise computing and high-performance-computing market. AMD dubs this chip Warsaw.

The other two parts, Seattle and Berlin, are less powerful and designed more for webscale workloads that can be parallelized. Berlin is a smaller chip that uses an Atom-like CPU core with AMD’s APU graphics core, while Seattle is the 64-bit ARM-based chip that could bring AMD out from Intel’s shadow. The Seattle chip will be in servers in the second half of 2014 and have eight and eventually 16 cores using the ARM Cortex A-57 design that can run at up to 2 GHz per core.

Andrew Feldman (pictured above), the corporate vice president and general manager of AMD’s server business unit, and a speaker at the GigaOM Structure event happening this week in San Francisco, says it’s clear that ARM will have a place in the data center, but he understands that he needs to make a case for AMD as a viable builder of ARM-based chips for that market.

He thinks that AMD’s experience building server chips will help it, as will his experience building out networking fabrics at SeaMicro, the company AMD purchased last year as part of a bid to get into the more power-efficient and dense server architectures. Feldman and I have discussed the changes in the data center — from small workloads to the need for power efficiency — for the last three years. It’s nice to see this vision closer to playing out in the mass market.

It’s too early to say how AMD will stack up against the myriad other vendors trying to build out ARM-based chips for the data center — or even how it will continue to stack up against Intel. But the new chips are a clear attempt to bring AMD into the new era of cloud computing. It’s a welcome step.

This story was updated Tuesday t 6am PT to correct errors about the chips names and cores.

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Can your dog help advance the Internet of Things? Ben Jacobs of Whistle thinks so and explains to Stacey Higginbotham how vets, researchers and pet owners can take advantage of data from devices worn by pets.

Lastly, our GigaOM Weekly Wrapup podcast recaps seven years of blogging as GigaOM celebrates another birthday. There’s more information on the PRISM saga and even a little gaming news: Did Sony turn the tables on Microsoft at this year’s E3 gaming convention?

(Download the GigaOM Chrome Show)

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So, in theory, apart from having advance notice to patch their own systems, those agencies could exploit that zero-day vulnerability to hack into your data, before Microsoft gives you a chance to patch the flaw. And it’s not just Microsoft. According to the report, “thousands of [U.S.] technology, finance and manufacturing firms” are closely aligned with American national security agencies, passing them information such as vulnerability details and hardware and software specifications, and giving them access to overseas facilities and data.

In return, Bloomberg claims, the agencies give the companies information about foreign attacks on their systems. Google is cited as an example of this, with Sergey Brin allegedly having been invited to sit in on a secret intelligence briefing after an attack by Chinese hackers in 2010. Of course, the companies aren’t the only sources of useful flaws — security expert and activist Christopher Soghoian detailed late last year how some security researchers sell vulnerability information to governments for large sums of cash too. “This is the [U.S.] government buying a flaw without the intention of fixing it,” Soghoian explained in his Harvard University presentation. (Thanks to Jeff Ausloos for alerting me to that one.)

Backbone hacking

The Bloomberg report also notes claims recently made by NSA leaker Edward Snowden that the U.S. hacks network backbones in China and Hong King. Although the evidence for this “Blarney” program appears scantier than that for PRISM, the gist is that the scheme captures metadata from internet-connected devices such as computers and smartphones around the world, including OS version, Java software version and browser. Again, this would make it easier for the agencies to target and hack such devices.

On the domestic front, the piece also claims a security system called Einstein 3, which is meant to protect U.S. government systems, can “expose the private content of the emails under certain circumstances.”

Who’s the customer?

But it’s the claims about U.S. tech vendors and their apparently voluntary information exchange with the country’s spy agencies that will most bother governments and their public sector organizations around the world.

Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw seemingly confirmed this cooperation in the Bloomberg article, saying the early release of vulnerability information helps to give the U.S. government an “early start” in protecting its systems. Other “trusted partners” reportedly include Intel’s security business McAfee, which apparently acts as a consultant of sorts to spy agencies wanting to know more about network architectures around the world.

There’s no suggestion that any of this data-sharing is illegal – but for many governmental customers around the world it will suggest that their vendors have undisclosed interests that don’t align with their own. For some in the U.S. tech industry, these revelations may turn out to be as damaging as PRISM, if not more so.

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Many of the men leading these companies, and they are men, are aware of their need to seem visionary, and tend to speak with grand rhetoric and bold statements about the future. But Simon Segars, the incoming CEO of ARM isn’t even inclined to big hand gestures. Instead, he speaks in a low, even voice and shies away from making grandiose statements or predictions. As a current resident of Silicon Valley, he is a reserved Brit working among the frenetic futurists of the Bay Area’s technology entrepreneurs and executives.

Next month Segars, currently the president of ARM, will take over as the CEO of the chip licensing firm, replacing Warren East who has steered for the last 12 years. Segars, who has actually been at ARM longer than East, has been the president of the company since January of this year, and has moved around a lot within the company’s business units as well as its offices.

Outgoing ARM CEO Warren East.

He’s currently based out of the company’s San Jose office, where he plans to stay for the next two years while his daughter completes high school. In a recent interview, Segars noted that ARM only has one customer in the U.K., and even East spends only a third of his time in England. “The job of ARM’s CEO is a roving one,” Segars says. However, he said he doesn’t have any plans to move ARM’s headquarters to Silicon Valley.

Changing captains in calm waters

That fits with the ARM mentality. The company, which was formed in 1990, is a pragmatic and steady member of the semiconductor world. Unlike more flamboyant executives, ARM’s East isn’t one to insult the competition — although because of its licensing model, its competition is hard to define.

ARM designs processor cores that companies ranging from Apple to Qualcomm use to build the chips powering the mobile phones that have so change our world in the last seven years. Companies can either license the ARM architecture as is and pay a fee on every chip sold, or they can take a deeper architectural license that allows them to tweak the core to build new functions and features for their particular market. With its emphasis on power efficiency over performance (although it’s pushing the envelope there as well) ARM has maintained a dominant position in the growing mobile market, while rival Intel has failed to place one of its x86-based chips inside a mass market handset.

East has said he’s leaving at this point because remaining could act as a brake on inovation. Plus the company is at a high point, making a shift in leadership less fraught.

Meanwhile, it has also made bets — some as far back as nine years ago — on the data center and networking processors as well as the rise of graphics processors. Much like Intel drove the x86 architecture to prominence with its PC chips in the late 80s and early 90s (and then pushed those into the data center and other realms), ARM’s power-sipping architecture is taking on more and more workloads as computing and connectivity are embedded in more and more places.

In the first quarter of this year ARM was the technology behind 2.6 billion chips. It also has added several new licensing partners from surprising areas, such as AMD, which has taken a license to make chips for the data center.

From mobile first to data first

So what does Segars plan to do as the next captain of ARM? Graphics cores will be one important area. While GPU cores are still not a huge business for ARM, Segars pointed out that licensees sold less than 50 million of its Mali cores in 2011 but 150 million in 2012. ARM estimates its GPUs comprised about 13 percent of the GPU market in 2013.

Other forward-thinking moves were the launch of the ARM Cortex A15 chip in 2010, which helped push ARM into the telecommunications networking equipment world, and the decision in 2010 to invest in Calxeda, design a 64-bit ARM core and give an architectural license to Applied Micro. Both moves were integral to bringing an ARM processor into the data center server market, where Intel has dominated but where power was becoming a concern.

This is what Segars sees for the future of ARM: More devices with computing and connectivity trying to share data on a variety of networks. You can call it the internet of things or just the obvious direction we’re heading as a technology-inclined society.

But Segars sees more people getting smartphones, more sensors and all of those billions of nodes sending back data to the cloud or even to local hubs for processing. Thus ARM is pushing it’s application processors and GPUs for all kinds of mobile phones; fancier, but low power chips for networking boxes; ARM cores for inside the data center for data analytics, compute and storage and microcontrollers for those myriad sensors.

Software is eating the world, but ARM has to stick with chips

Thus ARM’s big challenges for the next few years are less related to identifying the next big thing than building out this vision of the world. When it comes to the internet of things he’s trying to figure out the lay of the land: how do we stay open to innovation while addressing privacy and security? On the data and cloud computing side, he’s adapting ARM to a world where software is eating everything.

One of Dell’s ARM server designs designed to get ARM chips into the data center.

“Everything is virtualizing, where you can run everything in software on top of the hardware so you have more flexibility,” Segars said. “That trend is catching up on the networking side.” He noted that while running applications directly on the hardware will always offer better performance, ARM is hoping to win in these areas by being open to the virtualization trend while still offering power-efficient performance.

But the shift to a more software-centric world leaves Segars walking a thin line. He sees the importance of software to ARM’s success as an architecture, but it cannot develop its own software because that wouldn’t serve its chipmaking customers. In many cases, ARM’s customers (and other chipmakers) are trying to respond to this same challenge of software gaining in importance (and value) by building their own software.

Intel, for example has developed its own distribution of Hadoop as well as its own software-defined networking strategy that will put it in competition with switch makers. That’s a story playing out across the chip ecosystem, as virtualization means one could run a variety of chip architectures in one data center.

While ARM can’t try to build an enticing software layer to add value to its architecture, it can join partnerships to help make sure software that runs on the ARM architecture exists and can match features with Intel. It has joined partnerships such as the Linaro effort, as well as a security joint venture with Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient to offer its customers an ecosystem that supports the ARM architecture without stepping on their own software development efforts.

Is ARM the architecture for the internet of things?

As ARM attempts to break the x86 hegemony in the data center it’s also extending it’s business further down the computing chain to microcontrollers — the tiny chips that act as the brains in washing machines, smart sensors and other devices. While mobile phones and tablets are still a growing market for ARM, albeit one that Intel is also targeting, the possibility of a microcontroller in every appliance or a sensor on every bridge is one that ARM can’t ignore. Microcontrollers may not have the margins that application processors have, but they will be everywhere.

Chart proved by IC Insights.

According to Gartner analyst, Adib Ghubril, the global MCU market is roughly $15 billion but ARM’s cores are limited to the large 32-bit cores, where ARM has about 50 percent of the $5 billion global market. Ghubril says ARM’s going to go after the whole market, but to go for the whole thing means getting a 32-bit core to act like an 8-bit core. That’s possible and some vendors are doing that. Plus, thanks to the internet of things and the automotive markets, Gubril expects the 32-bit MCU market to grow, “like gangbusters” over the next five years.

And as Segars discusses the various ways one might implement security on networked devices, it becomes clear that ARM might find a new market for application processors inside home and industrial hubs where data from sensors is aggregated and processed before getting sent up to the cloud. He also discussed some of the subtle problems of the emerging market in data around connected devices that might find an answer in silicon.

If we want to use connected devices for setting prices or even medical monitoring, authentication will be important. One thought is to employ biometric security to authenticate the person wearing a device, which then would require smarter microcontrollers and more sensors. From Segars’ perspective, everywhere he looks he sees a potential home for ARM’s architecture.

That may not be realistic, but much like Intel rode the wave of cheaper general purpose computing, back when the IT world saw the value in taking “good enough” chips at a lower price, ARM is hoping that today’s focus on lowering the energy consumption of devices, as well as the benefits of having a wide ecosystem of silicon providers based on its architecture, will benefit it in more markets in the years to come.

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Don’t rush out to your nearest smartphone vendor just yet, though. While Intel is touting the benefits of Merrifield, the silicon isn’t expected in devices until early next year. That tells me that January’s Consumer Electronics Show will be — if the chip delivers as promised — likely the first event where multiple phone vendors show off hardware with Intel inside.

According to Intel, the new 22nm chip for smartphones will boost both performance and battery life and includes integrated sensor support hub “for personalized services, as well as capabilities for data, device and privacy protection.”

Of course, in a phone connectivity is of equal importance and this is where Intel’s 2010 purchase of Infineon comes into play. There were no smartphone announcements related to LTE but Intel demonstrated connectivity for the Galaxy Tab 3 with its Intel XMM 7160, claiming it’s one of the “world’s smallest and lowest-power multimode-multiband LTE solutions and will support global LTE roaming.”

Although the ARM platform has continued to improve since the 2007 smartphone revolution, Intel — on paper, at least — seems to be catching up in earnest. Perfect examples are the Windows 8 tablets that use Intel’s Atom chip: They compete well, both in price and battery life, with the ARM-powered Windows RT slates. Now we have Intel silicon in a Galaxy Tab running Android and next year, the potential for an array of smartphones.

It’s too early to say Intel is back when it comes to mobile, but it’s surely making every effort to stay in the game; something we couldn’t say just a few years ago.

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The new chips are a sign of two things occurring in the mobile market — the need for a greater range of processors to meet the needs across a broader spectrum of users as well as the growing prominence of the GPU. While ARM designs the brains inside the vast majority of mobile devices, it can’t afford to let someone else run away with the GPU.

The UK firm launched the Cortex-A12 on Sunday at Computex. The processor offers a 40 percent performance boost over the Cortex-A9 processor and features such as hardware virtualization and support for the new ARM big.Little heterogenous computing architecture. It allows device makers to pair the fastest cores with more energy-efficient ones under the same architecture. This means device makers can mix and match to eke out the most performance with the smallest power consumption.

With this latest core ARM is expanding the appeal of this modular strategy, with a core aimed at the mid-market, and expected in devices by the middle of 2014. While here in the U.S. where top-line smartphones are often subsidized by carriers, in other parts of the world a smartphone might cost $600. That’s still a pretty penny for many people, but the low-end Android handsets for developing countries aren’t a great fit either.

Along with the brains for the mid-market phones, ARM has also introduced its Mali-T622 GPU, which it hopes will be used in tablets and handsets, but also in set top boxes and other video-playing devices. ARM has been pushing harder on its graphics line in recent years, as GPUs become more essential inside phones and tablets. Playing video has become more common, but even everyday apps rely more on the GPU than one might imagine.

The Mali GPU, while in televisions and other home entertainment devices is competing with GPUs made by Nvidia in its Tegra chip, Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU, and perhaps soon against Apple, which has reportedly hired a bunch of former AMD graphics chipmakers for its own GPU dreams. ARM also is offering a video processing engine running on its cores that emphasizes quality without power consumption — exactly what hardware designers expect from ARM.

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Brandon Barnett

Perhaps it’s not surprising that a big company like Intel retains ethnographers, anthropologists and other social scientists on staff. Those people, who work inside Intel’s Interaction and Experience Research Lab, study how people around the world use technology and how technology affects cultures.

Lately, the researchers have been exploring the implications of the changing role of data in the computing ecosystem. The idea is to figure out how the growing openness of data from companies and governments could present business opportunities for Intel, said Brandon Barnett, director of business innovation at Intel.

It’s only natural that this is a bit amorphous — Intel doesn’t know exactly what will come out of it all. But as it throws support behind data-democratization efforts, the company has in mind a few use cases that hint at where commercialization could come in to play.

• An Intel researcher has built an application on top of multiple publicly available data sets depicting the trees and their pollen activity in Portland, Ore. The idea is for people to be able to find routes around the city that avoid trees that could cause allergy attacks. Without the application, people who move to town with allergies but no tech savvy might have a hard time commuting.
• High school students looking at colleges should be able to plug in information about their academic performance and non-accredited extracurricular activities and get recommendations for schools they should check out, based on demographic data, grant availability and workforce demand. While the data might be out there, it’s not all navigable in one place, and it’s not interactive. (This is one area that Intel wants people to work on.)
• Intel let Londoners look at their home energy consumption and compare it with others in the same age bracket or type of home. The trick here was to open up the data that’s relevant to certain users and to display it in a simple way. (Opower can do something related — compare people’s energy consumption with that of their neighbors.)
• It could be possible to suggest better public-transit routes by crossing people’s transit habits with data on lateness of buses based on traffic. That sort of data can otherwise remain in a silo and never get shown to people who could actually benefit from alerts based on it.
• A next-generation music application might be able to watch what music a person listens to, and then offer a ticket to see a preferred band when it stops by a local venue on a day the person has some free time. Such a service would take personal data and run with it by removing the hassle of identifying a band, checking out the tour schedule, finding a date that works and scoring a ticket.

It’s nice to see that Intel has ordinary people in mind, at least for now. It’s interested in constructing applications for lots of people to understand their own data and put it in context with outside data that’s narrowly tailored, “so we don’t end up with a bunch of hackers across the country coming up with better visualization tools,” Barnett said.

Of course, more public-private data mixing and analyzing could bring about the need for more computing power, and Intel wants to be ready if and when that situation arises. Currently available chips might be up for the job, or maybe a new model will be warranted. Intel has shown willingness to make custom chips for a single webscale company, Facebook, so delivering special equipment to fit a growing use case might not be unthinkable, assuming the scale is there.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Andrea Danti.

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Even if Intel powers just one Android tablet made by Samsung, it would be big for the Intel Atom team. Since debuting the Atom chip five years ago, it has typically been used in low-end PCs such as netbooks. Over the past year, Intel managed to get Atom silicon inside a few smartphones, but none of those devices have gone on to be major sales hits. The chip does power Windows 8(msft) tablets as well.

In this case, Samsung is one of the top Android tablet makers, giving Intel a chance to prove its Atom has the right blend of power and efficiency to compete in the growing mobile market.

I noted earlier this week that Samsung could be considering the move in order to keep its Exynos chips available for higher demand devices such as the Galaxy S 4 smartphone:

“So why would Samsung, which makes it own chips for smartphones and tablets, consider an Intel inside its newest Galaxy Tab? Samsung could be keeping the Exynos for its own handsets, such as the new Galaxy S 4, because it sells more handsets than tablets. The company’s tablets wouldn’t like suffer any performance hit by using Intel’s silicon either; at least not if the early benchmarks are valid.”

The timing of a potential Intel Atom design win is a little surprising to me. The company will debut the next generation of Atom chips called Silvermont in the second half of this year, promising three times the computing power or five times the power efficiency of the current Atom processors.

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