AMD Announces TrustZone Partnership with ARM

AMD is pouring a lot of energy into its APUs and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon. The company this week announced plans to integrate ARM technology into upcoming APUs. 

The partnership will see AMD inject ARM's TrustZone technology into future APUs via a SoC design methodology. AMD is calling it an industry first collaboration and says by adopting "the industry-standard approach to security that TrustZone technology embodies," the two companies will be able to provide a consistent approach to security spanning billions of web-connected devices, be they ARM-based or AMD x86 APU-based.

"As technology becomes more important to our everyday lives, security needs to be present in every single device. The challenge that the industry faces is how to make this a reality," said Ian Drew, executive vice president, strategy, ARM. "Through this technology partnership with AMD, and the broadening of the ARM TrustZone technology ecosystem, we're making another important step towards a solution. The aim is to make security accessible and consistent for consumers and business users across all computing devices."

All of this means that AMD will be adding an ARM processor to some of its upcoming APUs. Specifically, AMD has mentioned the Cortex-A5 CPU. This low-powered processor will work alongside AMD's own cores to run ARM's TrustZone security technology. THE ARM CPU will monitor and help protect against malicious access to sensitive data and operations at the hardware level.

AMD said today that it plans to provide development platforms that have TrustZone security features on select APUs in 2013, expanding further across its product portfolio in 2014.

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