News & Reviews:   ARM

By now, most of you should know about Qualcomm and the mobile chipsets it provides. But did you know that Qualcomm actually licenses its chipset designs from ARM? Well, that license could soon be changed, which could give Qualcomm some big problems.

It seems that next-gen of flagship mobile chipsets will be sacrificing power efficiency in favour of performance boost. This is according to a new leak that claimed ARM’s upcoming Cortex-X3 cores to be more power hungry than its predecessor.

The new Cortex-X3 cores are expected to make its way into next generation mobile chipsets including the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and Samsung Exynos 2300. Furthermore, it may even feature inside the MediaTek Dimensity 10000.

In September 2020, Nvidia had announced its plan to acquire Arm from SoftBank for about 40 billion USD (~RM164 billion). However, Qualcomm has jumped out of the middle of nowhere recently and offered to invest in the semiconductor company rather than purchase it outright, in the event Arm rejects the deal offered by Nvidia.

When Apple launched its M1-powered Macs last year, it showed how powerful ARM-based chips can be for more mainstream systems. Companies are looking to replicate that success for Windows devices, and ARM's latest chip architecture could be the key.

Based on a statement by gizmodo, it seems that there could be a possibility that Microsoft might unveil their own ARM processors sometimes in the near future. While there is no news on the exact release date of the chips, our source did mention that it will most likely be used for the Azure cloud servers, as well as their Surface laptops.

When it comes to mobile chipsets, the Exynos 990 hasn't been as impressive as this year's flagship Snapdragon 865. But Samsung decided not to throw in the towel and has two new chipsets on the way. One of it is the Exynos 2100 chipset, which a reliable source has some new info on.

For quite some time, there have been talks that Nvidia was looking to acquire Arm from SoftBank. That has been confirmed recently and it looks like the companies have come to an agreement. Sources say that all three companies have approved of a deal, with the entire turnover process expected to take around 18 months.

Despite waving goodbye to Intel's processor, Apple will still have some connection with the semiconductor company for their upcoming Macs. It is announced that the Macs with the Apple Silicon will continue to support Thunderbolt even though they are lack of Intel processors.

Sometimes, a company decides to cut off what it may deem unwanted excess to focus on more important things. That's what ARM is planning to do as it looks to offload its Internet of Things (IoT) divisions to SoftBank. This is so that the company can concentrate on what it's most famous for - designing chips for mobile devices and computers.

Most devices these days use chipsets featuring CPU and GPU cores from ARM, with new hardware announced once a year. Well, that time of the year has come and the company has now announced the Cortex-A78 and Cortex-X1 CPU cores, as well as Mali-G78 GPU that will greatly boost the performance of future smartphones.