UK-based chip designer ARM Holdings and five semiconductor companies yesterday announced the formation of a not-for-profit company that would provide resources for open-source software developers using Linux.
The announcement comes amid a recent boom in the deployment of open-source operating systems like search engine giant Google Inc’s Linux-based Android and upcoming Chrome system, which will need more sophisticated software to support further development.
The other founding members of the new firm — called Linaro — are Samsung Electronics Co, Freescale Semiconductor Inc, IBM Corp, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments Inc, according to a joint statement.
The formation of Linaro came six months after the companies started looking into this plan in November.
Linaro CEO Tom Lantzsch told a press briefing at Computex Taipei that ARM and its partners plan to collectively invest tens of millions of US dollars in the new company over the next few years.
Lantzsch, also an executive vice president of ARM’s corporate development department, said Linaro would have 100 engineers initially and planned to invest in open-source projects that can then be used by Linux-based distributions, such as the Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and WebOS.
“The dramatic growth of open-source software development can now be seen in Internet-based, always-connected mobile and consumer products,” Lantzsch said. “Linaro will help accelerate this trend further by increasing investment on key open-source projects and providing industry alignment with the community to deliver the best Linux-based products for the benefit of the consumers.”
“Linaro will work with the growing number of Linux distributions to create regular releases of optimized tools and foundations software that can be used widely by the industry, increasing compatibility across semiconductors from multiple suppliers,” the joint statement said.
Eventually, Linaro aims to allow devices manufacturers “to speed up development time, improve performance and reduce engineering time spent on non-differentiating, low-level software,” the statement said.
Linaro’s first software and tools release is set to come out in November and will provide optimizations for the latest range of ARM Cortex-A family of processors.
“It [the existence of Linaro] is going to be a boost to increase innovations and differentiations not only for chip vendors, but also for OEM using our chips in smartphones and other mobile devices,” said Seshu Madhavapeddy, general manager of Texas Instruments’ OMAP Mobile Communication and Computing Business Line Wireless Group.
Separately, Microsoft Corp yesterday inaugurated a research and development center in Taiwan focusing on cloud computing technology. The company did not disclose how much it would invest in the center, saying only that it would create new business opportunities for Microsoft and its Taiwanese partners.
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