News & Reviews:   ARM

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.

The HUAWEI Ban was signed in May 2019 declaring a national security risk emergency that banned U.S. companies from using telecommunications equipment made by Chinese firms has not come to an end yet. President Donald Trump has just announced another year of extension on the ban until May 2021.

It seems that China could be planning to utilize robot arms to perform various medical tasks on COVID-19 patients that could put doctors at risk if done in person. The aforementioned robot arms have cameras built-in and it can be controlled by an operator even if they are not located in the same city as the patient.

Things are seemingly grim for Huawei. Ever since Google announced that it will stop its services for Huawei, Qualcomm and Intel will also cut ties with them. But all is not lost, as of recent news, not everyone is on the same page with the US Government. This includes TSMC, Panasonic, Aptoide, and an official statement by Huawei CEO, Ren Zhengfei on the future of Huawei.

According to the BBC, ARM Holdings, designers of nearly all the smartphone chipsets and processors in the world recently sent out a memo to stop "all active contracts, support entitlements, and any pending engagements” with Huawei due to the US blacklisting. While ARM is a UK-based company owned by Japan-based SoftBank, it purportedly uses “US origin technology” in their designs which are also used in Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin chipsets. While this means that we could see less Huawei Kirin chipsets in the future, it isn’t all as grim or “insurmountable” as some may believe.

We are still in 2016, and the rumours for next year’s Samsung Galaxy S8 is already out. It has been reported that the next flagship from the Korean company will be using the in-house Exynos 8895, featuring the new Mali-G71 GPU from ARM.

Softbank, one of the world’s largest telecommunication conglomerate, just announced that they will agree to invest in ARM for USD 32 billion (~RM 127 billion). Just as a recap, ARM is the company that creates the basic chip building blocks for just about every mobile chipmaker out there.