Additionally, with more than eight billion GPUs shipped cumulatively, and more than one billion GPUs reported shipped in 2020, Arm Mali™ graphics processors remain the world’s number one shipping GPU.
Licensing remains strong
The Arm ecosystem continues to expand, with 162 licenses signed in FY20 by 104 different customers. More than half of the licenses were taken by first-time Arm partners. Recent customer wins include SEMIFIVE and Telechips. Additionally, there are now 90 active Arm Flexible Access partners benefitting from easier access to a broad range of world-leading Arm IP, tools and support.
Rene Haas, President, IP Products Group, Arm, said: “We expect demand for Arm-based solutions across all markets to continue, and to accelerate following the introduction of the Armv9 architecture. Armv9 is enabling our partners to offer greater performance and security in the products they are creating for 5G networks, more efficient data centers, and a huge range of endpoint- and automotive-based computing. This growth underlines our expectation that 100 percent of the world’s shared data will soon be processed on Arm; either at the endpoint, in the data networks or the cloud – forming a seamless compute thread throughout.”
The growth in Arm-based computing is the result of strategic investments, accelerated by SoftBank, that have enabled the company to push the boundaries of performance, security, and power efficiency. These investments have put Arm in the strongest position to support the demand for increasingly specialized and pervasive compute intelligence as the IoT and AI are driven to all corners of the consumer, business, transportation, and industrial sectors.
Rene Haas added: “The rapid growth and the record 7.3bn Arm-based chips shipped in the final quarter of 2020 is a testament to the incredible innovation from our partners across a diverse range of use cases from IoT devices to smartphones to supercomputers. Our focus remains on equipping this ecosystem with the specialized, secure and powerful processing needed to deliver the next 300bn chips, and beyond. The future is being built on Arm.”
Arm-based technology is driving life-changing use cases
Arm technology is deployed across a diverse range of applications having a positive impact on the world at a time when technology’s role in health, sustainability and productivity has never been more critical. Recent examples include:
Arm’s collaboration with Neocortix to offer Arm 64-bit support enabling the Folding@home and Rosetta@home projects that are combining the spare compute capacity of billions of Arm-based devices for medical researchers fighting against COVID-19.
Arm partner Hypergiant’s work exploring the use of AI to improve algae bioreactors that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere that resulted in the Arm CPU-powered Eos Bioreactor.
Rainforest Connection have been working with conservationists on a project in Indonesia, where they have deployed Arm CPU and GPU-based devices to listen out for the tell-tale sound of heavy plant machinery and chainsaws in the fight against illegal logging.