A specialist in processors - used in smartphones in particular - ARM is looking to broaden its horizons.
There was a time, not so long ago, when NVIDIA had the idea of acquiring the British company ARM. For the firm founded by Jensen Huang, the aim was to wipe out a potential competitor while benefiting from ARM's numerous intellectual properties and talented teams. Despite the progress of discussions and the colossal amount of the investment ($32 billion was mentioned), the deal never went through: several voices were raised to point out that NVIDIA could become too powerful as a result of this takeover. On the ARM side, reactions were discreet, but this long procedure - finally aborted - did not dampen the enthusiasm of the teams and management.
ARM
On the contrary, the latter seem intent on turning against the company that almost bought them, and if the Israeli newspaper Globe is to be believed, ARM is currently developing a graphics processor with the primary aim of competing with companies such as Intel and NVIDIA. The source of the media report is significant, as it leads us to believe that the ARM team in charge of this project is based in Israel, on the Ra'anana site. Israel is a major hi-tech research and development center, with ARM facilities as well as Intel, which employs over 10,000 people at its Haifa site. ARM doesn't have such large teams, and Globe quotes " an estimate of around 100 chip and software development engineers at the Ra'anana center ". Such a small team is unlikely to make NVIDIA sit up and take notice. However, while Microsoft has announced the release of a new family of machines with its Copilot+ PCs, the PC world's interest in ARM solutions has never been greater. Rather than sticking to its guns and contenting itself with the world of CPUs, ARM has sensed an opening in the world of GPUs... time will tell if its leaders have had the wool pulled over their eyes.
