ARM today announced its vision for transforming network infrastructure to address the demands of content-rich mobile experiences and IoT-based services in the next decade. To achieve this vision, ARM has worked with its partners to provide operators and service providers with a new approach for an Intelligent Flexible Cloud (IFC) environment to meet the unyielding latency, power and size constraints for next-generation networks.

IFC brings together platforms based on diverse, scalable, highly-integrated system-on-chips with heterogeneous compute capabilities supported by a common layer of enabling software and distributed network intelligence. It builds on technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), which combined with distributed intelligence enables applications to move out in the network to where data resides for a significant reduction in power consumption and increased responsiveness. The result is a more elastic and resilient network. This accelerates time to market for new services to meet the high velocity of cloud business model evolution and supports the forthcoming wave of data throughput and storage requirements that are projected to grow nearly 4X and 2X, respectively, in the next three to five years alone.

“The underlying network infrastructure that supports our mobile and connected world is undergoing a dramatic shift,” said Charlene Marini, vice president, segment marketing, ARM. “The scalability of ARM technology, combined with the networking systems expertise of our partners is increasing node intelligence and configurability, laying a new foundation for software-defined functions and applications. The move to the ARM architecture is underway, enabling new possibilities for an intelligent flexible cloud from device to data center.”

A research brief on IFC, “Bringing Intelligence to the Cloud Edge” by Moor Insights and Strategy was made available in February 25, 2015. Additionally, a whitepaper from ARM outlining new enabling technology standards, heterogeneous system on a chip (SoC) architectures, and the benefits of distributing intelligence towards the network edge is available to download on the ARM Connected Community.

An array of diverse silicon solutions targeting IFC requirements have been announced by many of the major silicon vendors who already have large footprints in networking today. A number have already started shipping highly-integrated and heterogeneous SoCs that will deliver against this new vision for network infrastructure. ARM and ARM ecosystem silicon vendors will be demonstrating multiple platforms highlighting IFC concepts at MWC 2015.