SoftBank-owned British chip design firm Arm rolls out new tech for mobile devices, Taiwan’s MediaTek signs up to use
- Arm’s new technology for mobile devices will be used by Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek to boost the performance of next-generation smartphones
- MediaTek has been pushing into the market to supply integrated circuits for premium smartphones, a market once dominated by rival Qualcomm
In Arm’s blog announcing the new products, MediaTek said the innovation will help improve the performance for next-generation smartphones.
Arm sells blueprints that chip designers use to build their own hardware. It is launching Immortalis-G720, a chip for video image processing and AI applications, and the Cortex-X4, a processor that would be the brains of the mobile device at Taiwan’s Computex conference and exhibition.
Arm said both new chips have 15 per cent better performance than their previous iterations, and the Cortex-X4 uses 40 per cent less power, which is key for smartphones that need to keep battery use time long.
British chip giant Arm aims to raise US$8 billion in US IPO
Asked by Reuters during a briefing if the tape out meant Arm was making a chip to sell instead of its long-time business model of providing the blueprint to chip makers, Chris Bergey, the general manager of Arm’s client line of business, said this was a step it sometimes takes to help test out new manufacturing technology for customers.
“Arm is not in the business of selling chips. That’s not what we do,” he said.
Last month, the Financial Times reported that Arm was developing its own chip to showcase the capabilities of its designs.
Arm said the Cortex-X4 was taped out on TSMC’s N3E process and said it was an industry first.