ARM TechCon 2015 Schedule – IoT, Servers, 64-bit ARM, Power Usage Optimization, and More

The ARM Technology Conference (ARM TechCon) will take place on November 10 – 12, 2015, in Santa Clara Convention Center, and just like every year, there will be a free exposition for companies to showcase their latest innovation and/or products, as well as a technical conference with sessions and workshops sorted into various tracks:

You can find the complete schedule on ARM TechCon website. Although I won’t attend, I’ve created my own virtual schedule with some of the sessions I found interesting.

Tuesday – November 10

• 8:30 – 9:20 – ARM Vision for Thermal Management and Energy Aware Scheduling on Linux by Ian Rickards (ARM), Charles Garcia-Tobin (ARM), Bobby Batacharia (ARM)

This talk will cover the history and where are we going, for ARM’s Power Software (IPA, EAS, and some concepts for the future).

ARM will detail the latest update on our thermal control software Intelligent Power Allocation (IPA) which has just been released in mainline Linux 4.2. The tuning and implementation flow allow IPA to be easily deployed in Linux-based devices including Android.

We will also introduce ‘Energy Aware Scheduling’ (EAS) which is a new development by ARM/Linaro to allow the Linux scheduler to make the most energy efficient decisions using a generic energy model based approach. EAS includes improved upstream Linux support for ARM “big.LITTLE” systems and other advanced multi-cpu topologies.

• 9:30 – 10:30 – Innovation is Thriving in Semiconductors by Mike Muller (ARM)

The human capacity to find a path past difficult challenges is astonishing. Though traditional silicon scaling is more complex at advanced geometries, electronics design innovation is more robust than ever as engineers devise new ways to improve the latest chips. ARM CTO Mike Muller will describe advances in design innovation spanning low power, trust, and architectural innovation all the way from sensors to server and beyond. And he’ll unveil the latest technology achievements from ARM in his signature lively, humorous and engaging style.

• 10:30 – 11:20 – IoT Prototyping 101: The All-in-One Platform by Steven Si (MediaTek)

Power efficiency, connectivity and size are top priorities for any developer looking to prototype innovative IoT devices. Best utilizing these key features with ARM’s technology will be the spotlight of this session a live demonstration of how a developer at any level can create the next big thing in IoT. Skills to be shown: connecting sensors; using a cloud interface to build a virtual device; sending data from the device to the cloud and communicating with other smart devices. (cnxsoft: possibly using LinkIt ONE platform)

• 11:30 – 12:20 – Khronos APIs for Fast and Cool Graphics, Compute and Vision by Neil Trevett (Khronos)

Discover how 100 companies cooperate at the Khronos Group to create open, royalty free standards that enable developers to access the power of hardware to accelerate the demanding tasks in cutting-edge mobile applications including heterogeneous parallel computation, 3D graphics and vision processing. This session includes the latest updates to API standards including OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenVX, and the recent Vulkan new generation graphics and compute API. The session will explore how modern APIs will accelerate the availability of compelling experiences such as neural-net based driver assistance, virtual and augmented reality, and advanced environmental tracking and 3D reconstruction on ARM-based devices

• 13:00 – 15:00 – Boosting Performance from ‘C’ to Sky with Custom Accelerators on ARM-based FPGAs by Shaun Purvis (Hardent)

Offloading tasks to specialized hardware, such as a GPU or FPU, is a common approach to boosting software performance. However, the fixed nature (i.e. hard-silicon) of such hardware places an upper limit on just how much performance can be boosted. In order to break down this barrier, some modern SoCs have combined ARM processing power with programmable logic allowing software to be offloaded to custom, scalable, accelerators. With accelerators that can be tailored to specific needs, suddenly the sky’s the limit! But that’s not all. Combining these SoCs with modern tools allows designers to migrate high-level functions directly to hardware, skipping all the hardware design in between. This presentation will introduce one such tool and discuss the design methodology that takes a software-defined system and turns it into a custom hardware accelerated one.

• 15:30 – 16:20 – Bringing Mali, the Android GPU of Choice, to Wearables by Dan Wilson (ARM Ltd.)

In this talk we will look at the trends for the use of graphics processors in Wearable devices and how the technical requirements of this space differ from that of smartphones and other segments. We look specifically at the ARM Mali GPU Utgard architecture which provides the perfect fit for Wearable designs and describe how this architecture has been implemented to create ARM’s latest ultra-low-power Mali GPU.

• 16:30 – 18:00 – Efficient Interrupts on ARM Cortex-M Microcontrollers by Chris Shore (ARM)

Most real-time embedded systems make extensive use of interrupts to provide real-time response to external events. The design of the interrupt architecture is crucial to achieve maximum system efficiency. When designing software for devices based on ARM’s Cortex-M microcontroller cores, it is important to understand the interaction between interrupt priority, sub-priority, tail-chaining and pre-emption to achieve the most efficient design. This session will examine various use cases and give practical advice to software developers.

Wednesday – November 11

• 8:30 – 9:20 – How (Not) to Generate Misleading Performance Results for ARM Servers by Markus Levy (EEMBC) & Bryan Chin (Cavium)

Cloud workloads are putting unique demands on SoCs and other system-level hardware being integrated into scale-out servers. Traditional benchmarks address the suitability of processors for different tasks. However, many factors contribute to the whole system performance memory, disks, OS, network interfaces, and network stack. In addition, the manner of generating workloads can affect the results. This session uses a case study from Cavium’s ARM-based Thunder X system and the EEMBC cloud and server benchmark, to present results that demonstrate how subtle test environment variations can obfuscate benchmark results and how a properly designed benchmark can overcome these obstacles.

• 9:30 – 10:30 – Keynote by Simon Segars (ARM’s CEO)
• 10:30 – 11:20 – Pentralux Flexible Digital Displays on Paper, Plastic, Cloth & Synthetics by Mathew Gilliat-Smith (DST Innovations), Anthony Miles (DST Innovations)

DST Innovations has created a flexible digital display proof of concept produced on plastic, paper, cloth or synthetic substrates. It’s integrated with the ARM mbed OS and will be suitable for developers and designers to integrate into third party products. Initially the digital screens will be for informational or promotional data and video. Being bright, safe, robust and requiring little power, the design parameters will be significant and far reaching for the wearable sector in thousands of clothing, fashion, promotional and other commercial concepts. The screens will offer inter-connectivity through the mbed ecosystem to receive transmitted IoT cloud generated data.

• 11:30 – 12:20 – Are you ready for USB Type-C? by Ravi Shah (NXP Semiconductors) & Andy Lin (NXP Semiconductors)

USB Type-C offers new features and benefits like reversible plug orientation, improved data rates up to 10 Gbps as well as an unprecedented, scalable, 100 W power-delivery capability that can power higher wattage devices and support faster charging. This session will review the features, benefits and applications it is being designed into today. In addition, design considerations and lessons learned from the field will be reviewed.

• 12:30 – 13:20 – From Concept to Reality: Advancing ARM-based Enterprise SoCs – Presented by Applied Micro Circuits Corporation by Dr. Paramesh Gopi (Allied Micro Circuits Corporation)

No abstract…

• 14:30 – 17:20 – STM32L7 Hands-On Workshop by James Lombard & Steve Miller (STMicroelectronics)

Thursday – November 12

• 8:30 – 9:20 – All Things Data: Healthcare by Pierre Roux (Atmel)

Examples of IoT are everywhere, including digital home, remote resourcing monitoring and automation, but what gets less attention is how the IoT will impact healthcare with the combination of technologies that leverages big data and analytics that go along with it.

This talk will look at opportunities, hurdles and the skills required to make the most of this intersection of Internet-connected physical objects and the deluge of data. It will examine new generation of data analytics for use cases associated with our changing world and, examine the role big data analytics will play in the future of the healthcare industry.

• 10:30 – 11:20 – The ARM Cortex-A72 processor: Delivering high efficiency for Server Networking and HPC by Ian Forsyth,  Director of Marketing, ARM

New content-rich features, services and evolving business models are transforming network architectures, giving rise to the Intelligent Flexible Cloud (IFC). Architects are decentralizing intelligence to deliver required flexibility and to cope with increased traffic demands. This, in turn, is driving new classes of SoCs, enabled by technology standards including software-defined networking (SDN) and network functional virtualization (NFV). These require significant throughput-per-watt efficiencies within networking and servers. This talk will explore how the latest Cortex-A72 CPU offers compelling performance and throughput to meet the requirements of these future workloads.

• 11:30 – 12:20 – Porting to 64-bit on ARM by Chris Shore (ARM)

With the introduction of the A64 instruction set in ARMv8-A, many developers need to port existing code to work in a 64-bit environment. At the coding level, this presentation will cover porting C code, assembly code and NEON code. Issues covered will include data typing and type conversion, pointers, bitwise operations, differences in the SIMD register bank layout, mapping of assembly instructions. At a system level, we will cover maintenance operations and extensions to the security architecture.

• 13:30 – 14:20 – Keynote- The Hard Things About the Internet of Things by Colt McAnlis (Google)

• 14:30 – 15:20 – Wearable System Power Analysis and Optimization by Greg Steiert (Maxim Integrated), Jesse Marroquin (Maxim Integrated)

This session will demonstrate how to extend battery life by showing the real world impact of system level architecture decisions. The session will introduce a technique for measuring battery current and then use that technique to compare the power efficiency of different system implementations. Tradeoffs analyzed will include: power architecture, operating voltage, sensor data interfaces, DMA, SIMD.

Takeaway: a method for measuring real time power consumption,  advantage of operating at the lowest voltage possible with efficient regulators, tradeoffs of different sensor interfaces and of different micro-controller architectures (peripherals/M0+/M3/M4)

• 15:30 – 16:20 – Improving Software Security through Standards Compliance and Structural Coverage Analysis by Shan Bhattacharya (LDRA)

This presentation will focus on secure software best practices. Ensuring the security of embedded devices involves more than simply using vulnerability preventive programming. However, paying attention to and leveraging security standards such as CWE/CVE, CERT C and even CERT Java, will certainly improve the probability of delivering a secure and effective system.

• 16:30 – 17:20 – Top Android Performance Problems of 2015 by Colt McAnlis (Google)

When you look at performance problems all day, you’re bound to lose your hair. So rather than balding early yourself, Colt McAnlis will walk you through the top performance problems that dominated 2015. This talk will cover the range of issues from Memory, to Rendering, to Networking, listing specific topics that have shown up in many of the top apps in Google Play. We’ll even take some time to look at the differences in some form factors, and how you should plan around that.

• 17:30 – 18:30 – Happy Hour 🙂

If you are going to attend, you can register online. While as usual, going to the expo and attending vendor’s sponsored sessions is free, there are different passes to join the conference sessions, ARM training day, and software developers workshops. The earlier you register, the cheaper.

There are also discounts for groups, students, press & media, and government employees. You can check details on ARm TechCon 2015’s Passes & Prices page.

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