News & Reviews:   ARM

NVIDIA and Microsoft have officially announced the NVIDIA RTX Spark which combines NVIDIA’s latest GPUs into a single ARM-based chipset for a Windows 11 system. It’s basically taking what Qualcomm and Apple are doing with their ARM chipsets and taking it to another level. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be cheap with estimates going for tens of thousands of ringgit.

Malaysia has sealed an agreement with Arm Holdings to position Malaysia as a destination for semiconductor production. To this end, Malaysia will allocate $250 million over 10 years to Arm and gain access to a wide range of semiconductor-related knowledge and licenses.

ARM has been known to this day for offering processor chip designs licensed by other manufacturers. Now, in addition to just designing, ARM is also reportedly going to produce its own processor chips this year. So, what should you know about it?

It looks like MediaTek is not resting on its laurels in its battle for mobile processor supremacy with Qualcomm and Apple. In fact, the company is expected to announce its next-gen SoC soon, the Dimensity 9400, which will feature ARM’s new CPU ‘BlackHawk’ architecture.

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.