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Freescale Technology Forum 2011

The Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) was held this week in San Antonio, Texas.  The event featured a wide range of presentations from a number of Freescale executives and keynote speakers.  The global themes of mobility, power, and scalability were prevalent under the overarching theme of connected intelligence.   

Tuesday’s session kicked-off with an opening keynote address by Freescale CEO Rich Beyer.  Along with a team of Freescale executives and business executives from Freescale partners, Mr. Beyer walked the audience through the wide range of markets that Freescale is targeting for growth.  Freescale also announced a number of product releases and partnerships focused around providing solutions to the issues of connectivity, power reduction, and scalability.

During the opening keynote, Freescale discussed its new QorIQ Advanced Multiprocessing series.  This 64-bit Power Architecture device can offer 24 virtual cores and delivers up to 4x the performance of previous devices.  This product is intended to meet the massive growth predicted in global IP traffic through this decade, which will be increasingly video.  Freescale expects nearly 2/3 of global traffic will be video by 2015, driving the need for better performance, lower latency, and increased connectivity. 

The morning’s lecture also covered smart-grid technology, where Freescale sees opportunities to reduce energy consumption by improving electric motors (which currently consume an estimated 25% of the world’s energy).  The cooling of data centers is also critical, with some 2.5% of the US energy supply used for this.  One potential solution, smart metering could provide trillions of savings over the longer term. 

Also, during the conference, Freescale announced closer relationships with partners Wind River and QNX Software Systems.  Freescale and QNX will develop solutions based around Freescale’s QorIQ and PowerQUICC processor families.  Solutions will address medical, industrial, and other markets.  The Wind River agreement will also address QorIQ and PowerQUICC products.  The goal of this agreement is to better leverage the capabilities of multicore SoC designs of the future. 

With its recent IPO netting approximately $783 million, VDC believes Freescale has put itself in a position to pay off its debt and actively grow the business.  New product lines like the QorIQ Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) series will likely allow Freescale to grow its profit margins and keep the company on the track of increasing revenues and eventually profits.