Chip designer ARM Holdings Plc on Tuesday unveiled a new processor
blueprint with improved computing performance and beefed-up graphics
aimed at smartphones and tablets to be launched next year.
ARM's new
Cortex-A72 processor design and related technology improvements come as
the smartphone industry struggles with cooling demand after years of
explosive growth sparked by Apple Inc's iPhone in 2007.
Investors
are concerned about lower royalty rates for ARM as growth in the
smartphone market shifts to China, where consumers typically buy devices
priced at $200 or less, compared with more than $600 in the United
States.
Rather than making its own chips, ARM licenses its
processor technology to other semiconductor companies, including
Qualcomm Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, as well as to Apple. It
receives royalties based on the selling prices of chips shipped by its
partners.
ARM's new processor has 3.5 times the performance of comparable chips from 2014, executives said at an event in San Francisco.
The
chip design will also deliver a 75 percent reduction in energy use,
helping reduce battery drain on smartphones, they claimed.
Some of
the improvements will be due to advances in manufacturing technology at
contract manufacturers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd,
the Cambridge, U.K.-based company said.
Nandan Nayampally, ARM's
vice president of marketing, said with the Cortex-A72's increased
computing horsepower, smartphones and tablets will be able to handle
complex computing like voice analysis without having to connect to the
Internet.
Many compute-heavy tasks on smartphones today are
handled remotely in data centers owned by Internet heavyweights like
Amazon Inc, Google Inc and Facebook Inc instead of by the
smartphone's processor, with results instantly sent to the device.
"There's
more than enough performance on tap (for) increasing complexity on the
local device," Nayampally said, adding that devices made with the new
chip technology would likely ship in early 2016.
Ten companies have licensed the new technology, including China's Rockchip and Taiwan's MediaTek Inc, ARM said.
ARM shares were up 0.6 percent to $47.64 in Nasdaq trading.
© Thomson Reuters 2015
Qualcomm Says Arm Has Withdrawn License Breach Notice7 February 2025
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