#Arm semiconductor

Arm, the chip designer known for powering nearly every smartphone and PCs, is set to unveil its first-ever processor this year, with Meta as its launch partner. Arm plans to outsource the manufacturing to a third-party factory, like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), with the chip potentially debuting as soon as this year. Arm's designs are already widely used in smartphones, Apple Macs, and Qualcomm-powered Windows PCs, thanks to their energy efficiency. The launch of its own chip will put Arm in direct competition with companies like NVIDIA, which already makes its own server CPUs based on Arm's technology. Arm has never made its own chips before; instead, it licenses its designs to companies like Apple and Qualcomm, who then customize and manufacture them through third-party foundry such as TSMC. If you're familiar with the 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 that powers the Samsung Wave and Galaxy S including the new Archos Android tablets, then it's going to be easy to imagine what a dual Cortex-A15 running up to 2.5GHz would look like. Samsung also announced a few days ago that they're shipping their new dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 1GHz starting 4th quarter of this year. ARM's dual-core Cortex-A15 MPCore can reach clock speeds of up to 2.5GHz and should be available by 2012. Read more in our articles including "Arm plans to develop its own in-house chip" and "ARM announces 2.5GHz Cortex-A15 MPCore".