Gadgetory

it's Darcy lack of a reporting live here from Mobile World Congress 2015 and I'm delighted to be at the arm booth again with a favorite of mine mr. James Bruce who is the director of mobile at arm how are you today sir I'm very one it's great to speak to you again Darcy thank you very much for your time sir so we've seen a lot of great things here at Mobile World Congress 14-nanometer SOC from XE notes in the galaxy s6 and a lot of other exciting stuff what do you what are you most impressed with that the show so far oh that's actually a really tough question and I think the sort of answer to that is you know no matter what price point you're at there's been some great handsets I mean obviously the galaxy s6 with the 14 nanometer arm SOC is very impressive at the premium and then you can go all the way down to some of the handsets that we've got that we're showing like a thirty dollar spreadtrum handset with a quad a seven or a $65 quad a 53 LT handset martyt 720 so I think that's a really important message from mwc now is you know no matter what price point you're buying a handset at you do have some great choices great performance and you know it's a great time to buy a smartphone I couldn't agree more so just taking a look back you know we spoke last year at mobile Congress you know it was a galaxy s5 which was debuted around that time what kind of performance gains are we looking at towards the upper tier of the market our end of the market year-over-year you think so I mean it's always a sort of difficult one to answer directly but I mean certainly the performance gains o over forty percent year-on-year some years it can actually be almost doubling some years it perhaps there's only twenty or thirty percent but I think the really important thing to emphasize is when you're looking at the handsets it's not just about the form about the overall user experience so if you have the sort of galaxy s5 and the galaxy s6 in your hand it's completely different and what I mean by that is just the changes in the mechanics the quality of the display and also the camera I mean you've suddenly gone from a sensor that wasn't optically image stabilized to a sense of that is so it's all those changes combined that deliver that new user experience the consumer you know it's really interesting that you say that now I take a look back you know the part the arm printer ecosystem is so vast and it continues to grow you know you all the way from rockchip all the way up to qualcomm you know XD notes we have the rise of high silicon out of Huawei and even LG now is participating in SOC architecture you just talk a little bit about about that yes so I think what you're seeing is we have lots of partners in the arm ecosystem and in the mobile space we have a great range of companies and I think it's really important from the perspective of the consumer because if you just have one chip supplier you know all the handsets are really just going to be variations on the theme when you've got all these different companies competing against each other trying to do things different that's when you get the diversity in smartphones those differences and that's where it's great to be a consumer so we're quite familiar you know with arm reference designs you know your leadership with an IP itself but can you just talk a little bit about the GPU space because we were just over with imagination and obviously Apple licenses their GPU architecture and now the rise of MIPS which is supported by android 5.1 lollipop and beyond but if you could just talk a little bit about arms Mally GPU architecture relative to power be our imagination and you know feasibly the future as well so I think the important thing is really sort of just talk about you know the various Molly devices that we've seen at the show I think it's really impressive now that are mollys now the number one licensed GPU IP is shipped over a billion units and I think there's some great devices you're seeing sort of T 720 @ sort of $65 T 760 based devices starting at three hundred and I'm sure she's talked about that some premium devices using the Marley t 760 and I think it's certainly from the perspective of the actual use of these phones I think the important thing is really to look at the capabilities of the GPU and certainly as an Android user what I'm excited about is as android 3.0 sorry as opened less 3.0 3.1 comes into the market how the games developers take advantage of that and also you're seeing sort of supporting technologies for example we had the enlightened announcement yesterday with the new lighting technology having that great and just using the term eye candy ena that big change in your gaming capabilities in the handset I think it's going to be a really interesting year to be a gamer on the smartphone so I mean we continue to see massive performance gains you know the utility and the performance of these devices at all ends of the pricing spectrum are just continue to improve how close do you think we are to achieving truly desktop like performance in a mobile device to having the one device that can be the primary and they are so I mean obviously if you let's say a professional designer or if you're using AutoCAD then you're still going to use I'll get back to desktops but I mean as a typical consumer or someone who's you know really just someone who uses office on their desktop or laptop I think we're almost at that point now and I think it's going to be really interesting to see over the next couple of years how the form factors and the connectivity changes to take advantage of that increase in performance on your smartphone but another exciting corollary to that is a the launch of ddr4 ram in a mobile device you know industry-first the galaxy s6 is bringing and we spoke with micron and it looks like they're packing a lot more performance finally guys yeah absolutely and I mean low-power ddr4 is vital for delivering that user experience and I think it's very good that you brought that up because quite often when you talk about smartphone performance we talk about things like CPU clock speeds GPU but you really do need that memory subsystem to actually transfer the data to these compute units and low-power ddr4 is that next stage so we're going to be speaking again next year oh but just so perhaps we could have a little bit of a look into the future are we going to be seeing more versions of a the big little type design or is there anything exciting that arm is working on that you could shed some light on for the future well I mean obviously big little is going to progress I I really look at 2015 is a year the big little you've obviously got these up to a 50 threes where they're effectively doing two clusters one running very fast one running efficiently and I think we've asli announced cortex a 72 but if I was to give it to you in one sound by I think it's more of the same but better you can see that continuous innovation that's between our partners and also that should we say friendly competition that drives and to do better and that s and I think I come I'll come to mwc 2016 and there'll be lots of new handsets that I'll be really excited about and that's the great thing about the sort of smartphone business is that every year you come to the show and you're always excited I mean there's not a lot that we can discuss more obviously the rise of em bed you know armors still continue to work with a lot of developers and opening up the ecosystem providing the resources so that people can you know really grow mobile technology and with the rise of wearables even though still a relatively small product category now probably double or triple in size by the time we have a conversation next year and that's the great thing about the arm ecosystem if you actually look at harm what we do is we were actually quite boring we supply important IP and it's our silicon partners and OEMs who actually come out with this cool new stuff but sometimes you just don't even think about and that's why it's so exciting to work for arm because now two years down the line you see stuff went wow I never even thought about it yeah but I want to say a huge thank you for your time it's always at privilege and are able to speak with you James so and it's it's always great speaking to you Darcy thanks so much you all right starts like ave reporting live here family WC 2015 signing off