If there is no ARM, which architecture will be suitable for IOT in the future?

　　Let's assume that billions of chips will flood into the IoT market in the future. At the same time, let's continue to assume that these chips use ARM's Cortex-M core. Now that SoftBank's acquisition of ARM is a foregone conclusion, there are only two futures: one is that SoftBank continues to maintain ARM's independence, and Cortex-M is still the core that occupies the IoT market.

　　Another possibility is that SoftBank made an unconventional adjustment to ARM's development direction, which made licensees very angry and they would look for other IP products everywhere. What are they?

　　1. MIPS has some top cores, and Imagination (the owner of MIPS) has a solid foundation and good reputation in IP licensing through its PowerVR GPU cores. It doesn't have as strong an ecosystem as the ARM architecture, but it does have some stars, such as the MIPS microcontrollers (PIC32) made by Microchip and the MIPS64-based Loongson cores made in China.

　　Microchip just acquired Atmel, including a large number of its ARM-based MCU products.

　　2. Some new freely licensable chips, such as RISC-V and OpenRISC.

　　3. China has developed one of the most powerful computers in the world, with a completely new architecture. What else can this vast country do? If you want to create hundreds of millions of IoT nodes, then cost will become an important factor. At this time, you need a low-cost kernel, that is, a kernel that does not take up too much memory and can run a wireless stack (probably 32-bit) - obviously a free stack and C compiler will have an advantage.

　　Security is a top priority for IoT – if the node is not secure (except for the simplest applications) the product is vulnerable to attack and can sometimes open a path to the entire network it is part of, including the phone it is connected to.

　　ARM has a clear advantage in IoT software and hardware security, and anyone who wants to surpass ARM in this regard will have to work twice as hard - but MIPS is also a leader in security performance. Of course, I am also looking forward to seeing more leaders stand out.

　　By the way, let’s talk about “architecture”

　　The "architecture" referred to above is the "instruction set architecture" (ISA), which describes the instructions that are executed. In fact, it should be said that the "instruction set" is the intellectual property that needs to be protected for most processors.

　　The "A" in ISA stands for "architecture," which better describes how the processor hardware works - such as von Neumann and Harvard architectures. For example, different hardware architectures can execute the ARM instruction set in the Cortex A_, R_, and M_ cores.