Arm rolls out new smartphone chip technology

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Arm rolls out new smartphone chip technology

Arm is rolling out new smartphone tech and MediaTek signs up to use.

Arm Ltd on Monday rolled out new chip technology for mobile devices and Taiwan smartphone chip maker MediaTek Inc said it will use it for its next-generation product.

MediaTek, a longtime provider of low- and mid-tier smart phone chips, has been pushing into the market to supply chips for premium phones, once dominated by rival Qualcomm Inc, which has been in a legal battle with Arm since last year over chip licensing agreements.

MediaTek's blog, Arm's new products, said the chips will help enhance the performance of its next-generation smartphones.

Arm sells blueprints that chip designers use to build their own hardware. Immortalis-G 720 is launching at Taiwan's Computex conference, a chips for video image processing and AI applications, and the Cortex-X 4, a processor that would be the brains of the mobile device.

Arm said the new chips have 15% better performance than their previous generations, and the Cortex-X 4 is 40% less power, key for smartphones that need to keep battery use time long.

Arm also said it taped out the Cortex-X 4 at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which means it had a chip manufactured at the factory, an expensive process that is usually done by chip designers that sell the final chip.

Asked by Reuters 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. It's not what we do, he said.

The Financial Times last month reported that Arm was developing its own chip to show the capabilities of its designs.

Arm said the Cortex-X 4 was taped out on TSMC's N 3 E process and said it was an industry first.