How ARM triumphantly marches around the world
Automakers
In mid-October, the annual Qualcomm summit was held, where they showed the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. This event is mainly for partners and developers. It reached us in the form of an echo. Realme sent a press release that it will soon release a smartphone based on this chipset, which will score 3 million points in the AnTuTu v10 test. By the way, the first screenshots of performance tests have begun to appear, and so far the result is not 3 million, but only 2.7 million points.
I was more interested in the list of guests for the event. T. M. Ro, the president of the mobile division of Samsung, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of the company that cannot be named in Russia, and Satya Nadella, the CEO and chairman of Microsoft, were noted, and there was also a whole troop of automakers at the event, which, in addition to others included representatives of Mercedes and General Motors. And even Toto Wolff was the CEO and co-owner of the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula 1 team.
All this suggests that ARM architecture is on the rise and everyone wants to take part in this celebration of life. Well, European and American manufacturers in general should reduce their gap with the Chinese. Let me give you a few examples of technologies that Qualcomm presented.
This way, a translucent projection-type overlay will appear in front of the driver, which can display information on “points of interest” that he passes by. For example, if you drive past a museum, the name, opening hours and ticket prices will appear. On the one hand, this sounds like a banality, on the other hand, such things require large computing power and a good Internet connection.
Another technology involves setting up the speakers in such a way as to create a separate audio zone for each passenger. That is, if, for example, a passenger in the rear left seat says that he is cold, then the car will change the climate control specifically for him. Of course, for this, the car must have zone climate control.
And in the end, Qualcomm showed my dream. If there is no parking at your destination, the car can drop you off at your location and then use AI to drive you to a pre-designated parking location. And then he will come and take you back.
In this case, perhaps the most interesting are the comments of automakers, who all unanimously said that this is no longer a concept, but a matter of the next couple of years.
Nvidia, ARM Holdings and Qualcomm: squabbling over money
After the summit in press Rumors have leaked that Nvidia has acquired the license from Arm Holdings. Let me remind you that most modern technologies have a company that owns the technology and sells a license for it. For example, for OLED screens this is Universal Display Corporation, which has the OLED ticker on the stock exchange. And for ARM chipsets, this is the Arm Holdings company, which is engaged in development and every year introduces a new chipset design, and then sells licenses for the right to use the technology. Arm Holdings usually holds a presentation in the spring, showing the capabilities of the new chipset. And then Qualcomm, Apple, MediaTek, Samsung receive a “blueprint” and are working on refining the chipset, trying to get the most out of the technology. And then they send their developments to contract manufacturing. For example, to TSMC or Samsung factories.
And if Intel didn’t want to sell x86 licenses to anyone, then Arm Holdings, in fact, built its entire business on this.
And so, according to rumors, Nvidia bought a license to develop chipsets. According to Reuters, Nvidia is supporting Microsoft in this difficult matter, which is dissatisfied with how well Apple dominates the ARM laptop segment. Cooperation with Nvidia also shows that Apple has become disillusioned with the capabilities of Qualcomm and Samsung, which were previously close partners in the ARM arena.
Rumor has it that within a year Nvidia may introduce its first ARM processor. In principle, the deadline is realistic, given that Nvidia recently entered into a partnership with MediaTek. Probably, the output could be a product similar to that of Qualcomm and AMD. In case you forgot, all Snapdragon chipsets have a graphics part called Adreno. The name was invented by taking the name of Radeon graphics and swapping the letters.
In principle, Nvidia has every chance of success, given that Qualcomm itself is now suing Arm Holdings. Thus, Arm Holdings published a 60-day notice of cancellation of Qualcomm’s license to manufacture and sell chipsets with ARM architecture. It is unlikely that Qualcomm will lose its license, although, of course, now everything looks very serious. Perhaps it’s also worth reminding here what all the fuss is about. So, in 2021, Qualcomm bought Nuvia, whose license Arm Holdings had previously revoked. That is, Qualcomm could not use Nuvia’s developments in its activities, but it did. This doesn’t sit well with Arm Holdings, which says that if you want to use the Nuvia experience, we need to renegotiate the license terms (ie pay more!).
Accordingly, the dispute will sooner or later be settled by Qualcomm paying a lot of money. Here, by the way, a very clear moral can be drawn: do not bite the hand that feeds.
To conclude this story, I will say that the arrival of Nvidia is a great event for the entire gaming world. Apple’s ARM chipsets have shown that they are quite capable of running modern AAA games, but they lack optimization. Given Nvidia’s experience in the gaming space, as well as their huge influence, with all game studios adapting their products to GeForce graphics, full-fledged ARM gaming will soon be upon us. That is, there will be gaming laptops that weigh a kilogram and do not require connection to an outlet.
And it is likely that Nvidia decided to approach the project also for the reason that Apple is starting to succeed in something.
Apple and games
As they say, the road can be mastered by those who walk, or in the case of Apple, those who crawl. For almost the third year now, Cupertino has been trying to convince everyone that macOS and iPhone are excellent gaming platforms. So, there are already as many as 3 computer games that work sadly on the iPhone. Particularly annoying is the presence of graphics settings that the user has to tinker with. Although, in theory, there should be only two graphics quality options in the settings: iPhone 16 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro.
However, the company does not give up and confidently highlights the gaming capabilities of its products. For example, here’s an image from the new Mac mini page. Here next to the PC lies a PlayStation 5 controller.
In theory, by the way, you can play Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding and Control on the Mac mini. Plus, Apple supports ray tracing at the hardware level, and even the company has an analogue of DLSS in the form of MetalFX AI upscaling.
Looking at the Apple TV+ service, one can assume that the company will develop the gaming component in a similar way, that is, slowly adding new releases and waiting for quantity to turn into quality.
The gaming market is somewhat similar to the streaming market. Here everything still comes down to exclusives, and all companies dream of making their own “Game of Thrones”, which will be published for many years, retaining subscribers.
Perhaps the story of Nvidia’s imminent arrival will stimulate Apple to speed up. Although, perhaps, this battle has already been lost and the status quo “Apple is not about games” will remain. Still, unlike Apple, Microsoft has its own armful of game studios, which, on command, quickly adapt their releases to ARM-Windows.
Conclusion
When they say that technology has not developed in recent years, this is a big stretch. Today, several big projects are looming on the horizon that could change the structure of the world around us.
ARM architecture is already fighting almost equally with x86 processors and is even winning, winning more and more players to its side. And in many ways, what’s happening is to the benefit of smartphone manufacturers, whose technology is becoming more and more universal. The HUAWEI smartphone, which folds out into a tablet, is further confirmation of this.
In turn, smartphones are under pressure from the emerging category of augmented reality smart glasses. A device that can be controlled by the “power of the eye” and voice is more promising than smartphones. Here one could argue that smartphones can also be controlled by voice, but there is a difference in approaches. In the case of a smartphone, you want to point your finger at the screen, because initially the interface and logic of the system are touch-sensitive. In the case of glasses, everything is created under control through tracking of the pupils and voice.
And so far all these technologies seem futuristically distant, but in fact they are already here, and they are literally 2-3 years away from commercial success. At the same time, notice how market leaders who seemed indestructible are losing their positions. In this case, I’m talking about Intel. The corporation had problems for a long time, but no one seriously believed in them. Well, yes, there is some kind of crisis, but Intel still has the entire market in its pocket. And in the end the company falls to pieces.
Source: mobile-review.com
