10 Hot Topics at ARM TechCon

10 Hot Topics at ARM TechCon

Looking for the agenda-topping items at ARM TechCon 2012? From the "big-little" revolution, and engineer accreditation programs, to discissions on FinFETs and more, there'll be deep technical discussions with a practical bent. Please check out our list below for a preview, and come to the conference, which runs Oct. 30 to Nov. 1 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, California.


[Designing with ARM? Get a 10% discount on ARM TechCon 2012, Oct. 30 - Nov. 1 in Santa Clara. Click here to register for the year's biggest and best live event for the ARM community. ]


1. Free training for ARM accreditation

The ARM Accredited Engineer (AAE) program will be prominent at the show. In effect, it will be a roll out for the program. ARM first talked in July about its testing scheme for engineers to qualify as AAEs; it now plans to introduce a further hierarchy of advanced and specialist qualifications.

"More exams, yuck," I here you say, but apparently it is what employers want as a means of selecting engineers who can hit the ground running with ARM-based design, so gaining the qualifications may help with employment and salary prospects.

On the first day of TechCon (Tuesday, Oct. 30) there will be whole day of training from 10:00am to 5:00pm aligned to the AAE syllabus. The day is free-of-charge and comes with a 20 percent discount on the cost of taking the exam, as long as you do so within three months. The day is estimated to be worth $500 but provided for free. Details are expected to be posted soon. On days two and three there will be the opportunity to take a mock version of the exam; a try-before-you-buy sample of the level of the questions that should take about 10 minutes I am told.



ARM is offering the chance to get more letters after your name



2. Watch the start of the big-little revolution

In the past TechCon has been a great place to watch important ideas in computing get discussed and rolled out. 2012 looks to be another such year.

ARM introduced the idea of "big-little" processing in 2011 when it introduced the Cortex-A7 processor as a companion core for the Cortex-A15. Now the idea is being turned into chips. The way it works is that for background demand processing switches to the power-optimized A7 while the A15 is off. When demand ramps up processing moves seamlessly to the A15 and the A7 switches off.

It's a neat idea that trades off some real-estate and therefore cost for a power-efficiency advantage. And at 2012's TechCon the first silicon implementation looks set to debut courtesy of Samsung.

William Kang, senior director of SOC development at Samsung promises to discuss Wednesday Oct. 31 at 11:30am how his company has implemented and extended the big-little concept in its Exynos range of processors. Brian Jeff, a product manager at ARM, is set to discuss the method and the first processors that implement big-little in a 50-minute presentation at 10:30am on Thursday (Nov. 1). Check the searchable program [link] online but I found a couple more sessions relevant to big-little on the software side.



Hands-on training is an important part of ARM TechCon


3. Go graphical

Another major thread in processing much talked about but yet to be implemented much in the real-world is using graphics processing units to do more than render images. TechCon is unlikely to disappoint on this front.

A presentation from Michael Anderson of engineering consultancy PTR Group is set to outline how to take advantage of the GPU in applications. Roberto Mijat, an ARM software solutions architect presents a couple of papers in the multimedia track on the same topic. One explores use cases and design considerations for Mali-T6XX series GPUs for general-purpose computation. The other provides an introduction to the Open Computing Language (OpenCL), a programming framework for parallel heterogeneous programming. It offers insights into programming OpenCL by example, using use cases from image processing, computational photography, and computer vision.
Next: On the show floor
TAG:ARM TechCon intellectual property ARM processor IP conference exhibition