Everyone wants to make (or at least be part of creating) their own chips. Google with the Tensor of its Pixel mobiles, Samsung with its Exynos, Microsoft with the recently announced Athena and Apple with its Apple Silicon for both the iPhone -the last being the A16- and its Mac.
There is more, of course, and they all have in common that they are manufactured following ARM designs, the famous architecture. good now it seems that ARM has gotten tired of just designing chips and wants to make its own processors, becoming fully involved in both the development and production of semiconductors. The objective? Show that your designs are the best.
The objective? Create the best ARM-based chips. Industry fear? that they sell them
ARM designs are the most adopted by the entire industry of semiconductors. The ARMv8 have been giving war for more than a decade and both Qualcomm and Apple have given a good account of the veteran architecture.
A couple of years ago the relay was announced, the ARMv9 architecture with 30% performance improvements and specially designed to work with artificial intelligence, something that, in 2023, is very fashionable with the famous Chat-GPT or image generators.
ARM designs are very flexible and they make it possible to create ideal chips for the consumer devices we have on a daily basis -such as mobile phones or computers-, but they also power devices such as supercomputers for the cloud or servers.
Go that the company has in its possession one of the largest assets in chip development and, in fact, the clash with Qualcomm a few years ago over licensing issues shook the foundations of the industry. Something that also made the industry nervous was Nvidia’s attempt to buy ARM, but in the end it came to nothing.
All that aside, ARM – owned by Japanese giant SoftBank – looks set to take action and, as the Financial Times reports, is gearing up to stop being just a chip-designer: you want to build them to demonstrate the potential of your designs.
This news has two sides. On the one hand, it seems that the announcement that ARM will start manufacturing its chips is aimed at attracting investors. And it is that SoftBank is trying to increase ARM’s profits in the US market and this announcement could contribute significantly.
With the ARMV9, the power of both GPU and GPU was improved, optimizing processes for AI.
According to the Financial Times, A.RM is beefing up with an in-house team of engineers apart from its partners at Samsung and TSMC with the aim of creating these chips. They are also working with Intel on processors for smartphones. They want to produce processors for mobile phones, laptops and other types of devices and in front is Kevork Kechichian, one of the Snapdragon supervisors in recent years.
We’ll see what happens with this project, but there are two things to keep in mind. The first is that there may be fear on the part of its main clients, such as MediaTek or Qualcomm, that ARM starts selling its chips and, therefore, goes from being an ally to a competitor. Being the one who designs and manufactures the chips can make their own processors better in terms of power, efficiency or both.
The second thing is that, again, according to the Financial Times, people close to ARM affirm that the company does not intend to sell its chips and that it is only working on prototypes, but ARM has also commented that It is one thing to work on intellectual property and quite another to manufacture something. The latter has more financial risk, and at some point ARM will need a return to justify the investment.
It is clear that we must be attentive to the movements that take place from now on, since if ARM seeks to sell its processors in the future, it will lose that situation of ‘neutrality’ that it currently holds.
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