ARM has published a new video demonstrating what it thinks will be the future of computing. It foresees the day when our smartphone will one day be our "true primary compute device," which will smartly change modes depending upon its context/location.
In its slick, frictionless, demonstration ARM has managed to eliminate any wired docking shenanigans and demonstrates a continuity in workflow from mobile to desktop, from touch to mouse and keyboard.
As you can see in the video above ARM has worked with existing technology, including a 'last generation' Samsung Galaxy Note 3, to demonstrate its idea of 'Seamless Computing'. ARM's Eric Gowland simply sets his smartphone down on the desk, the Note 3 detects the wireless charging ability of the desk surface and understands the context change - thus it pairs wirelessly with the keyboard and mouse (Bluetooth) and the display (Miracast) without any prodding. Importantly the UI is then automatically reconfigured for a desktop experience including the use of Android's two pane views. Following his desktop computing tasks - a bit of word processing and email - Gowland picks up his Note 3 and it auto configures back to perform as a smartphone on the go.
ARM has published a blog post which goes into the technical details behind its implementation of 'Seamless Computing', as demonstrated in the video. Reading that post you can find out the range of choices ARM made to set up its context sensitive system.
In conclusion ARM admits that this is just one vision of the future of computing and it remains to be seen if the world would like to follow. This may well be the shape of things to come - or not.
One thing is certain though - the experience demonstrated in the video above is only going to get better, faster and more capable. ARM recently announced its 'Premium Mobile Experience' for 2016 and gave us the first details of the new ARMv8-A-based ARM Cortex-A72 processor, the ARM Mali -T880 GPU and the ARM CoreLink CCI-500 Cache Coherent Interconnect. These new components will offer a large step up in horsepower with great energy efficiency. ARM's new Cortex-A72, for instance offers 3.5X the performance of the popular Cortex-A15 CPU and the new Mali GPU boosts graphics performance by 1.8X compared to its predecessor.
