Chip design company Arm is helping companies innovate to deal with a surge in demand for compute at the edge, according to Mohamed Awad, vice president for IoT at Arm.

He was speaking at an event by Taiwanese company Advantech at last week’s Embedded World conference in Nuremberg, where Advantech was pushing its co-creation policy including collaborations with MediaTek and Canonical.

“The IoT runs on Arm,” said Awad. “It is the architecture of choice for the IoT.”

The collaboration brings together a cloud native stack from Canonical, certified boards from Advantech, silicon from MediaTek, and Arm’s Project Cassini, an open, collaborative, standards-based initiative to deliver seamless cloud-native software for devices based on Arm Cortex-A. Developers of IoT and infrastructure edge products can access Cassini with Arm SystemReady and PSA-certified silicon and development boards and Linux support from the Arm ecosystem.

“Project Cassini brings our partners together,” said Awad. “It lets us support the most recent versions of software so companies such as Advantech can focus on innovation.”

An example of the collaboration is Advantech’s RSB-3810 single board computer that includes MediaTek’s Genio 1200 system-on-chip with four Cortex A78 and four Cortex A55 cores using Arm SystemReady.

“Arm SystemReady specifies how a device should boot,” said Awad. “This means the most recent software works on the platform.”

The Genio 1200 targets smart home appliances, industrial IoT applications and AI-embedded devices.

“One of the reasons we are seeing this movement towards Arm is we are surpassing performance specifications,” said Awad. “Another reason is because of initiatives such as Project Cassini. Software has evolved so much we can take an off-the-shelf operating system and adapt it easily. This has driven adoption.”

David Beamonte, product manager for Canonical, added: “Developers and manufacturers just want to focus on their applications so they want to trust a reliable and secure underlying framework with a long lifecycle.”