Hi, and welcome to the Arm 'What is' program series. In each episode, we explore a tech
topic to give you insight and perspective into some of today's hottest design trends.
I'm Brian Fuller, editor-in-chief at Arm. And today we're going to find out what is
Arm Virtual Hardware?
And to help us with that, I want to introduce Stefano Cadario,
director software product management with Arm, and he's not helping us understand
what is Arm Virtual Hardware, Stefano spends his free time training for triathlon events
to make sure he can at least get to the finish line in one piece. Let's get started.
So Stefano, what exactly is Arm Virtual Hardware?
So Arm Virtual Hardware is a functioning accurate model of a non based chip that
basically runs in the cloud. What this means is that Arm Virtual Hardware symbolize the behavior
visible from the software, but abstract all the complexity around the underline hardware.
So think about a virtual machine, but specifically designed for Arm-based IoT devices and available
to customer directly in the cloud. So thanks to Arm Virtual Hardware, IoT developers can leverage
the flexibility and its kind of the beauty and power of the cloud to dramatically improve
productivity when you use cloud-based modern development techniques, such as CI/CD DevOps.
So, what are some of the main use cases for Arm Virtual Hardware?
We see three main use cases for Arm Virtual Hardware. The first one is the ability to
start developing software, ahead of a hardware availability. Think about a case where you just
open your favorite IDE, connect reviews for target and start typing, you know, examples without, you
know, waiting for your colleague or your supplier to ship the board to your house or to your office.
The second use case is continuous integration and testing all in the
cloud. So real hardware is very difficult to scale even for relatively cheap, $20 boards,
it requires space and equipment and maintenance and time to set it up. So Arm Virtual Hardware
allows you to move lots of the testing from real hardware to the card infrastructure,
and you can enable with that to scale to hundreds or thousands of boards within
minutes. So no more time spent fixing and lose power cables in your board for.
The third and last use cases, are our LoBs. So we're increasing demand
and adoption of a ML at the edge, the ability to estimate how fast in a ML model could run on the
device is very critical. So Arm Virtual Hardware provides this functionality and integrated with
ML tools and powers data scientists to iterate and experiment with different
network architecture and optimizations much more quickly compared to doing with real hardware.
Wow Stefano, that is brilliant. Now,
does it mean that this can be used to measure the performance of a chip?
Yeah, that's correct. Brian. So although Arm Virtual Hardware is not really the right tool
to do cycle-accurate performance measurements, such as an FPGA. It does provide information
such as instruction count on the CPU side that can be used in for performance,
for example, for regression tests or performance estimation.
So, how do you see Arm Virtual Hardware evolving in the coming years?
So we are just at the beginning of this journey. And if you think about 15 years ago, it wasn't
that easy to deploy your web application across the globe in minutes through Docker containers
and, you know, scaling infrastructure, we're not buying a bunch of service and
putting some kind of darkroom. So I believe Arm Virtual Hardware will play a fundamental role
in moving IoT engineers to a new cloud-based development that where the hardware becomes
kind of visually available in the cloud. And it's possible to fully test your application completely
the cloud without with automatic deployment of new firmware predict actual deployed devices.
So we need to move to a cloud-based software development processes if you want to empower
engineers and data scientists to scale IoT to 1 trillion devices.
And I think Arm Virtual Hardware play a key role in this.
Well thanks. Stephano that is just amazing. Finally, cloud-based design is here now.
Now check out all our other 'What is' episodes and be sure to subscribe to the channel right here,
because we'll be adding more episodes as the year progresses. Thanks for listening!