Industry News

Arm's own chip as soon as 2025 Intel 18A process, MediaTek faces a big challenge!

Update time : 2023-04-26 12:02:04

After the recent market rumors that Arm wants to produce its own chips for smartphones and laptops, etc., the foreign media pointed out that Arm's own chips will be built by Intel's foundry division, turning into Intel's foundry customers. It will use Intel's 18A process, which can be benchmarked against TSMC's 2nm.

Arm seems to be not satisfied, feel that the income is still too little, so start planning to produce their own chips, the past 6 months to recruit engineers to form a development team, want to The team will not only lead the next generation of solutions, but will also be responsible for the development of the next generation of chips. Market sources say Arm's latest chips will be more advanced, offering end devices such as smartphones and laptops.
Intel and Arm recently announced an agreement that will enable chip designers to use Intel's 18A advanced process to build low-power processors, focusing first on mobile devices and expanding to autonomous driving, the Internet of Things, data centres and more in the future. From the point of view of timing and technical requirements, and Arm's own chip production plans coincide. If the news is confirmed, the market predicts that Intel's OEM Arm chips will appear after 2025.
Traditionally, Arm licenses its instruction set architecture, the logical design of its CPUs or GPUs, the silicon proven physical design of its CPUs or GPUs and various other IP blocks to its customers and does not produce its own chips. arm has built test chips with partners such as Samsung and TSMC in the past, but only to allow software developers to familiarise themselves with the new products. But this time, according to industry sources at the Financial Times, the solution engineering team led by industry veteran Kevork Kechichian is developing a chip that is said to be more advanced than ever before. Arm declined to comment on the information.
According to a source close to Arm in the Financial Times, this is not the case. The company reportedly only wants to develop one or more prototype chips to demonstrate the power and performance capabilities of its IP. At the same time, developing complex systems-on-a-chip is very expensive. It is estimated that a fairly complex 5nm SoC design could cost up to $540 million (including software), while a complex 3nm SoC could cost up to $1.5 billion (including software) to develop.
As Arm itself has not commented on the matter, we can only guess what its solutions engineering team does. Given the increasing cost of chip design, it might make sense to invest in chip design for Arm.
For example, the company may be developing customisable silicon-proven reference designs containing IP that is guaranteed to work perfectly when implemented on a given process technology. few companies can afford to invest $500 million to $1.5 billion in chip design, but they may want to get a license for something that is guaranteed to work.
Another reason why Arm is developing a physical implementation of its IP is that in the coming years many of its customers may decide to license small chips or small chip designs rather than IP for cost reasons.
But in either case, Arm could end up competing with its own customers, such as Qualcomm, MediaTek, NXP and other companies that sell chips to device manufacturers.
If Arm produces its own chips, MediaTek would be the one to hit the hardest. Because Qualcomm acquired the NUVIA team the year before last, has begun to develop its own architecture, although it will still use the ARM instruction set, but also gradually abandon the public version of the architecture provided by Arm, and Qualcomm's team R & D strength is not weak than Arm, so the future even if Arm launched its own chip, Qualcomm should not worry about proving its competition. On the contrary, MediaTek, has been using the public version provided by Arm, more subject to Arm, so once Arm launched its own chip, then it is conceivable that MediaTek will not get more advanced than the public version of Arm's own chip.
Of course, ARM's self-produced chips are a double-edged sword, perhaps pushing more manufacturers into the RISC-V camp, and once the ecology matures, ARM may be eliminated from the market like the Mips before it.

Previous : ADI Appoints Alan Lee as Chief Technology Officer

Next : Tesla's Shanghai Plant to Produce Model Y for First Export to North American Market

How many chips does a car need?

Sep .19.2024

Automotive chips can be divided into four types according to their functions: control (MCU and AI chips), power, sensors, and others (such as memory). The market is monopolized by international giants. The automotive chips people often talk about refer to

Position and Function of Main Automotive Sensors

Sep .18.2024

The function of the air flow sensor is to convert the amount of air inhaled into the engine into an electrical signal and provide it to the electronic control unit (ECU). It is the main basis for determining the basic fuel injection volume. Vane type: The

Chip: The increasingly intelligent electronic brain

Sep .14.2024

In this era of rapid technological development, we often marvel at how mobile phones can run various application software smoothly, how online classes can be free of lag and achieve zero latency, and how the functions of electronic devices are becoming mo

LDA100 Optocoupler: Outstanding Performance, Wide Applications

Sep .13.2024

In terms of characteristics, LDA100 is outstanding. It offers AC and DC input versions for optional selection, enabling it to work stably in different power supply environments. The small 6-pin DIP package not only saves space but also facilitates install

About Us

About Us What we do Quality People

Products

CHIP/IC Active devices Passive device Components OTHER

China electronic components supplier----Wah Luen Shing Electronic.----www.wlschip.com

Leave a message