VIDEO INTERVIEW: ARM, now subject to a £24 billion takeover bid from Japan’s SoftBank, outlined its commitment to support the smartphone experience of the future, with VR, IoT security and wearables growth at the heart of its strategy.
The UK-based chip technology company is set to be acquired by the Japanese giant, in a move SoftBank said will help it to capture the “IoT opportunity”, where ARM is said to have made significant investment in recent years.
Speaking to Mobile World Live recently (before the deal with SoftBank was announced), David Maidment, mobile strategist at the company, described ARM as “obsessive about delivering increased performance while maintaining or reducing power consumption”.
He said applications like VR need more performance power to work to their potential “because phones are not getting any larger yet, and batteries remain the same in size”.
“[For services like VR] from a consumer point of view they are really looking for high resolution displays, very immersive graphics and very low latency in terms of how the mobile is reacting. As the users move around, you don’t want the graphics to be slow or jumpy, so we’ve been focused on reducing power, increasing performance, and delivering that in the same kind of physical form factor that you would expect today in a mobile device.”
Maidment also discussed some of the fundamental challenges facing the wearables segment.
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