Arm unveils new chip technologies for smartphone video games

Arm, the British chip technology company owned by the SoftBank Group, on Tuesday unveiled a set of new chip technologies aimed at making video games look better on smartphones while preserving battery life.

The latest products are designs of graphics processing units, or GPUs, most often used for video processing in games. Arm makes money by licensing its designs to chip companies like MediaTek who in turn use them to design chips for Android-based smartphones.

On Tuesday, Arm also updated plans for its processors, or central processing units, the main brains of a computer. In either case, Arm aims to improve chip performance while consuming less electricity.

The latest push to improve mobile chips comes as Arm customers like Apple and Qualcomm reduce their reliance on Arm.

While Apple and Qualcomm still pay licensing fees to Arm to ensure their chips work with software written for Arm-based chips, they now design many more critical parts of their chips themselves rather than designing them themselves. use designs manufactured by Arm.

“Our latest suite of compute solutions for consumer devices will continue to raise the bar of what is possible in the mobile market,” said Paul Williamson, director of Arm, in a blog post announcing the new products.

“For developers, making these real-time, immersive 3D experiences even more engaging and engaging requires more performance.”

A recent report found a sharp drop in graphics chip prices, which could portend a quick and unexpected end to a global chip crunch that has crippled manufacturing from smartphones to cars.

As Intel, Qualcomm and others report, investors will gauge how much lower consumer spending due to inflation, China’s COVID lockdown and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are offsetting market lockdowns. the supply chain for microchips.

The trigger is a drop in the prices of GPUs, or graphics processing units, which are the brains of gaming machines and are spreading to other uses.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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