New mobile chip technology was unveiled by Arm Ltd. on Monday, and Taiwanese smartphone chip maker MediaTek Inc. announced it would use the new technology in its upcoming model.

The market for premium smartphones was previously dominated by competitor Qualcomm Inc., which has been in a legal dispute with Arm since last year over chip licencing agreements. MediaTek, a veteran provider of low- and mid-tier smart phone processors, has been moving into the market to offer chips for these devices.

MediaTek claimed the new chips will aid in enhancing the performance of its next-generation smartphones in Arm’s blog post announcing the new devices.

Arm offers chip designers the blueprints they need to create their own hardware. At Taiwan’s Computex conference, it is introducing the Immortalis-G720, a chip for video image processing and AI applications, and the Cortex-X4, a CPU that would serve as the mobile device’s brain.

According to Arm, both of the new chips perform 15% better than their predecessor generations, and the Cortex-X4 consumes 40% less power—important for smartphones that need to maintain a long battery life.

Arm also claimed that the Cortex-X4 had been “taped out” at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. This means that Arm had a chip made at the factory, a costly process typically carried out by chip designers who then sell the finished product.

Chris Bergey, the general manager of Arm’s Client Line of Business, said this was a step it occasionally takes to help test out new manufacturing technology for customers when he was asked during a briefing if the tape out meant Arm was making a chip to sell rather than its long-standing business model of providing the blueprint to chip makers.

“Arm is not in the business of selling chips. That’s not what we do,” he said.

The Financial Times revealed last month that Arm was creating its own chip to demonstrate the functionality of its concepts.

Arm said it was a first for the industry when the Cortex-X4 was taped out using TSMC’s N3E process.

(Adapted from ThePrint.in)

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