Arm Ltd, the British chip technology firm owned by SoftBank Group Corp, on Tuesday unveiled a set of new chip technologies aimed at making video games on smartphones look better while preserving battery life.
The latest products are designs for graphics processing units, or GPUs, most often used for video processing in gaming. Arm makes 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 upgraded plans for its CPUs, or central processing units, the main brains in a computer. In both cases, Arm is aiming to improve the performance of chips while using less electricity.
The latest push to improve mobile chips comes as Arm customers like Apple Inc and Qualcomm Inc are reducing their dependence on Arm.
Arm has a champion in the shape of HPE, which has added a server powered by the British chip designer's CPU cores to its reliant portfolio, aimed at cloud-native workloads for service providers and enterprise customers alike.
This being HPE, the new server will also be available for purchase or through HPE’s “pay-as-you-go” Green Lake subscription service.
“This is a good step for Arm as it does mean major enterprise OEM support,” said Andrew Buss, IDC's research director for European enterprise infrastructure.
“It’s also timely, as it comes alongside the release of Arm-native tools from Microsoft that will help expand the capabilities of the ecosystem, as well as dovetail with the availability of Arm instances in the public cloud,” he added.
HPE’s EVP and general manager for Compute Neil MacDonald said that the reliant RL 300 Gen 11 has been “designed for cloud native” across a range of workloads, including the needs of service providers and digital-first enterprises.
But those are somewhat specialized systems, while the reliant RL 300 Gen 11 is aimed squarely at the mainstream, or at least the part of the mainstream that is adopting “cloud native” workloads.
“The reliant RL300 Gen 11 server is engineered to deliver high performance, high core count, and energy efficiency for a wide range of cloud-native workloads, including common ones such as web servers, memory caching, and data streaming,” an HPE spokesperson told us.
This focus on “cloud-native workloads” could be seen as a tacit admission that the reliant RL300 Gen 11 is not going to be running the legacy Windows-based applications and services that many enterprise organizations are still highly dependent upon, but it is still a rapidly expanding sector of the market, according to HPE.
Media chief analyst Roy Lesley agreed that existing X86 workloads are not likely to be migrated to Arm.
“This is about having products that will work with the new workloads where lower power and by association lower carbon footprint, is a critical factor,” Lesley said, adding “we think a lot of this will be at the edge.”
If this sector of the market does prove fruitful, then HPE may have stolen a march on its rivals, as no other major vendor appears to be planning mainstream Arm-based server systems.
" Our latest suite of compute solutions for consumer devices will continue to raise the threshold of what's possible in the mobile market," said Arm executive Paul Williamson in a blog announcing the new products.
" For developers, making these immersive real-time 3D experiences even more compelling and engaging requires more performance."
Gud one...
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