The race to provide ever faster, cooler and more efficient processors has gathered further steam this week with the news that a major partnership has been brokered between ARM and GlobalFoundries.
The agreement will bring further development of system-on-a-chip (SoC) technology which ticks not only the faster, cooler and more efficient boxes, but also significantly cuts down on cost – a major factor for next-generation smartphones and smartbooks. Key to this will be the move to a 28-nm manufacturing process. The smaller feature size not only means smaller chips, but more chips packed into larger wafers, which significantly cuts cost of materials (and therefore size and cost).
“This announcement reflects our business value and strategy of providing best in class processor implementation by marrying our own processor and physical IP with world class manufacturing semiconductor technology,” said ARM CEO Warren East. “This collaboration with GlobalFoundries and their commitment to delivering leading edge technology makes them an ideal partner to accelerate the adoption of ARM processor based technology at 28nm.”
“This relationship further advances our strong focus to partner with industry leaders in processor design to deliver manufacturing and technology excellence at the leading edge,” added GlobalFoundries CEO Doug Grose. “This highly complementary partnership leverages ARM’s architectural leadership along with GlobalFoundries advanced technology to enable the deployment of 28nm SoC designs with exceptional performance for next-generation consumer devices.”
The hope is this deal will put further pressure on the likes of Intel, AMD and VIA in the battle for the mobile computing space – now easily the hottest sector in the electronics industry. One should not think for a moment that ARM developers are any less clever at reducing power because they have never owned their own chip manufacturing plant. ARM’s Cambridge team revealed at a California conference this week that they have developed a test chip, running on an advanced “silicon on insulator” 45-nm process, that cuts 40 percent of power compared to a standard silicon chip.
We aren’t likely to see the benefits from the GlobalFoundries partnership (and 28-nm manufacturing) for some time, but when we do, expect portable devices to be even more exciting than they are today.
Gordon
