14 DAY TRIAL // If you have been keeping up to date with tech industry then you are pretty much used to seeing ARM's name pop up just about everywhere in the news, but his time things are a lot more festive since the company has been celebrating its 20th anniversary for the past few days, ARM choosing to unveil its new graphics wing amid the celebrations.
Founded in 1990 as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer and VLSI technology the company was intended to further develop the Acorn RISC architecture, when Apple sought developing the Newton PDA.
Although the Newton turned out to be a flop, ARM had a much brighter future in front of it and managed to become one of the biggest names in the chip industry thanks to its low power RISC processor architecture that is used in smartphones and tablets everywhere.
However good things may go for the ARM processing architecture, things are a lot different in the low-power graphics world, Imagination Technologies developing some of the fastest and most wide-spread solutions available.
But ARM is serious about this market too and, in order to show its commitment to mobile graphics, the company has just announced the opening of a new building at its Cambridge campus that will house its multimedia team.
This will lead the way in developing new graphics chips that are able to compete with Imagination's PowerVR's SGX series that is used in a wide range of devices including Apple's iPhone, Samsung's Galaxy S and Motorola's Droid phone line, to name just a few.
Although we definitely can't say how long it will take for ARM to come with its own design that will be able to compete with these solutions, one thing is certain.
The company is dead serious when it comes to its graphics business and I am sure we will soon have one new contender in the low-power graphics market. (via Hexus)