Who would have thought that ARM, the discreet architect behind most of our smartphones, would one day launch into the arena of high-performance GPUs? Yet this is the crazy bet that the British company seems to be making, according to sources close to the matter.
What if your favorite PC game ran on a graphics card that wasn’t made by Nvidia, AMD, Intel, but… ARM! This scenario, which would have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago, could well become reality in the not-so-distant future.
According to information from the Israeli economic newspaper GlobesARM, the British giant known for its mobile processor designs, is said to be secretly working on its own dedicated GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).
So yes, I see you coming: ” But doesn’t ARM already make GPUs for smartphones? » Indeed, the company has been offering graphics units under the name Mali for years, which equip many Android smartphones. But here, we are talking about something much more ambitious: a GPU capable of running PC games, or even serving as an accelerator for artificial intelligence. In other words, we are completely changing dimensions.
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A bold but risky bet
Entering the consumer GPU market is a bit like deciding to climb Everest in flip-flops: it’s possible, but it promises to be pretty damn complicated.
Intel had bitter experience with its Arc GPUs, which struggled to take off despite the firm’s colossal resources. The crux of the matter? Drivers, these small software programs that provide the link between the hardware and the operating system.
Developing powerful drivers for Windows is a real headache, especially when you have to support DirectX, Microsoft’s proprietary programming interface, in addition to OpenGL and Vulkan.
But ARM may have an ace up its sleeve: its expertise in the field of energy efficiency. ARM processors are known for their low power consumption, a significant advantage at a time when there is increasing talk of eco-responsibility in the world of tech.
AI, the real goal?
However, there is certainly something fishy going on. What if gaming is just a facade, a secondary objective for ARM? The real Holy Grail could well be artificial intelligence. Think about it: Nvidia is currently booming thanks to the AI boom, with its GPUs being widely used to train and run computationally intensive AI models.
Rumor has it that Softbank, the owner of ARM, is interested in developing its own AI accelerator. This GPU project could therefore be the first stone of a much more ambitious edifice. Is ARM looking to position itself on the lucrative AI accelerator market, while keeping a foot in the gaming world to diversify its revenues?
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It’s an attractive hypothesis, but it raises many questions. Does ARM have the financial strength to embark on such an adventure? Will the company, which does not produce its own hardware but sells architecture licenses, have to review its business model? And above all, how will the giants in place, Nvidia and AMD in the lead, react? Far too many questions for a Monday morning of recovery.
In any case, Samsung is asking itself exactly the same question right now.
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Source: www.frandroid.com
