Published in PC Hardware

ARM does well because of embedded

by on13 February 2015


ARMv8 does well

Analysts have been looking under the bonnet of ARM's good results and discovered that they might not be down to its traditional mobile stomping ground.

Tom's Hardware pointed out ARM made 25 percent more profits than it expected in the last quarter but most of the chips appeared in embedded devices rather than smartphones. The company saw strong adoption for its ARMv8 architecture and its Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 CPU cores, which go into mobile devices.

ARM's Chief Financial Officer, Tim Score said that following the acceleration in royalty revenue growth in the second half of 2014, and with a wide range of OEMs (manufacturers) introducing products based on ARM's V8 architecture this year, the outlook for royalty revenues this year is very encouraging," he said.

Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung and Mediatek licensed ARM's 64-bit designs instead of going with their own.

This can't last, Qualcomm is to release its own CPU core at the end of the year, it should give ARM a significant boost in profits and revenue over the next few quarters.

With the switch to the new architecture, ARM has also boosted its royalty from one percent of the chip's prices to two percent.

Score said royalties will play a significant role in the company's revenues. He also said that ARM signed 53 new licensing deals in the last quarter, including eight for the ARMv8 architecture.

He expected that by the end of the year, half of the smartphones in the market will be powered by an ARMv8 chip. In the last quarter, ARM made $182 million in profit and $348 million in revenue, so the company is highly profitable as more than half of its revenue is profit.

The revenue is split evenly between licenses and royalties. ARM said that it's expecting to get a 10 percent increase in revenue year over year in the next quarter.

Last modified on 13 February 2015
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