Arm Unveils New Processor, Systems to Help Speed Up Connected Device Development

Arm Ltd, the British chip technology firm owned by SoftBank Group Corp, on Tuesday unveiled its latest micro controller design and two new systems to help reduce development time of so-called “internet of things" of connected devices. The new products come as SoftBank looks to publicly list Arm after Nvidia Corp’s deal to buy it collapsed following regulatory objections.

The Cortex-M85 micro controller will help improve artificial intelligence operations such as voice recognition on devices including smart home products and drones, said Mohamed Awad, vice president of internet of things and embedded at Arm. The M85 is 20% faster than the previous M55 chip for machine learning applications, the company said.

Arm supplies the underlying blueprints for chips that chipmakers or electronics makers can tweak and take to foundries to manufacture physical chips. Arm is increasingly providing blueprints not just for single chips but sets of chips, or systems, that can work together, said Awad.

In October it launched a system for keyword recognition, and Tuesday it unveiled two new systems called Corstone 310 and 1000 that can be used for voice recognition, security cameras and payment systems.

“When I talk to my ecosystem partners, what I hear more and more is, hey, we’re strapped for resources; we’re trying to get a lot done; what can you do to help us get to market more quickly? And this is really our answer to it," said Awad.

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Arm also increased the range of chip designs that can be tested out virtually in the cloud for software developers to create new software even before the chip is physically delivered. For decades, the process of developing most computing devices saw chips and hardware first completed, then prototypes passed on to software developers to write code for the chips.

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