An edge device in every home, office, street corner, etc.
“The way it works is like this: Microsoft makes its system-on-chip (SoC) blueprints available to chip designers, which fabricate the chipset and flog it to IoT device makers. These manufacturers slap the silicon in their products, and run Microsoft’s Linux-based Sphere OS along with their own software on the chip, which connects to Microsoft’s Azure Sphere running on Redmond’s cloud.
Sphere does things like make sure gizmos only run official firmware, and automatically pushes out and installs bug fixes on remote devices, and so on. In the process, the chipmaker moves more silicon, the device vendor gets a turnkey security service to show to customers, and Microsoft gets a cloud customer for the lifespan of the device.”
Original source: Microsoft has designed an Arm Linux IoT cloud chip. Repeat, an Arm Linux IoT cloud chip