AMD Processors Get ARM Security Processor
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. Yesterday
at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit AMD announced the HSA foundation. The
HSA Foundation partners AMD, ARM Imagination, MediaTek and Texas
Instruments to come up with an open standard, you can find the full
story on that here. Today though, AMD is extending the partnership with ARM to further reaches and has signed a licensing agreement with the company!
AMD just announced that they are going to start implementing new
security measures into their future APU's (Accelerated Processing
Units) by using an ARM Cortex-A5 processor with TrustZone Technology.
This means that AMD is licensing ARM cores and actually integrating them
into their x86 based APUs as a platform security processor. AMD told us
the company's "commitment to x86 hasn't changed," and that x86 is still
here to stay.
AMD has been working on this for some time and is going to start
introducing this technology select APU's in 2013. The first devices to
see this technology should be fanless class (tablets and other small
mobile devices). By the end of 2014 it will be implemented across AMD's
entire product stack.
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By utilizing a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design,
