AMD Licenses ARM Technology - ARM TrustZone technology Coming To APUs
Over the past year there has been much speculation that AMD and ARM would enter some sort of an IP licensing deal. Many expected to hear some big announcement like AMD licensing ARM’s CPU cores or ARM licensing AMD's Radeon IP, but that didn't exactly happen. That changed today when AMD announced it will integrate the ARM TrustZone technology into future Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) via a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design methodology.
With all the bad press AMD gets, I think they've put themselves in a position to ensure their future. The companies involved have put some good forward thought into their plans. Intel is a step behind in this regard, at least for now. I could see them catching up, but their path isn't the same right now. I've read some articles where tech folks think PCs are going to be gone soon, and we'll be cloud computing from various devices in the near future. If you look at NVIDIA and their cloud technology now, they too are in a prime position to move forward. I love my PC and don't want to give it up.
Cloud computing for enthusiasts like myself is like letting someone else drive my car.
I see the ole campaign promise of Obama where "everyone will have internet", free internet coming true. Why? Because cloud computing will require you to pay for computing services anyway once online. It will be an "amped-up" version of paying for your own game server that everyone will end up getting if they want to game or do anything more than social networking and such.
Intel has it's own equivalent of TrustZone technology built into its processors. Its called TXT. AMD was developing its own Secure Execution Environment, but it looks like AMD ran out of time. That is why they added the ARM TrustZone technology. Vendors like Microsoft are urging processor vendors to support secure boot and some sort of Trusted Execution Environment to protect data and proprietary content.
To use the TrustZone hardware security extensions, developers must run a secure kernel as well as a normal operating system. There is open source software at http://www.openvirtualization.org that allows ODMs/OEMs to support TrustZone technology.
