British Chip Company Arm Launches New Chip Technology For Smartphones And Energy Savings

JAKARTA - Arm Ltd, a British chip technology company owned by SoftBank Group Corp, on Tuesday, June 28, unveiled a series of new chip technologies aimed at making video games on smartphones look better while saving battery life.

The newest product is a design for the graphics processing unit, or GPU, which is most often used for video processing in games. Arm makes its money by licensing its blueprints to chip companies like MediaTek Inc. who in turn use them to design chips for Android-based smartphones.

Arm on Tuesday also stepped up plans for its CPU, or central processing unit, the main brain in computers. In both cases, Arm wants to increase chip performance while using less power.

The latest push to upgrade cellular chips comes as Arm customers such as Apple Inc and Qualcomm Inc reduce their reliance on Arm.

While Apple and Qualcomm still pay Arm some licensing fees to ensure their chips work with software written for Arm-based chips, they are now designing more critical parts of their chips themselves than using Arm-made designs.

“Our new computing solutions for consumer devices will continue to raise the threshold of what is possible in the mobile market,” Arm executive Paul Williamson said in a blog announcing the new product.

"For developers, making these immersive, real-time 3D experiences more engaging and engaging requires more performance," Williamson wrote.