14 DAY TRIAL // ARM has been doing a lot of things lately, but the latest act on its part, or one of them, was the setting up of a new production facility.
ARM is said to have announced the opening of a new factory in Taiwan.
One thing the new design center will do is tighten the relationship with ARNM's Taiwan-based partners.
TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) is the oldest, main collaborator in the region.
Some time ago, the two made a deal which implied that TSMC would be developing physical IP, like memory products and standard cell libraries, on the 28nm and 20nm process technologies.
Now, ARM has entered an agreement with UMC as well (United Microelectronics Corporation), which will also offer access to physical IP on the 28nm node.
These two companies are just part of the reason ARM actually opened the new facility.
However, the real purpose of the new R&D center at the Hsinchu Science Park, northern Taiwan, is to develop physical intellectual property products like CPUs and GPUs.
That's Cortex-A Series central processing units and the new Mali-T600 Series graphics processing units.
“The center will enable even closer interaction with local ARM partners and serve as an important focal point in the region for advanced technology engineering,” ARM said in a statement.
“Product development is now underway at the center for 28nm and 20nm technologies, targeting advanced ARM Cortex-A Series processors and Mali-T600 Series GPUs.”
ARM used to not be any sort of competitor to Intel, and vice-versa, but then tablets showed up and NVIDIA created the Tegra 2 platform.
Now, ARM has more or less become a direct competitor to NVIDIA as well, since it built the new and improved Mali-T600 Series graphics chips.
2012 will bring Windows 8, which supports both x86 and ARM platforms. There is going to be a fierce competition on all sides when that happens.