Shanghai electronics firm licenses ARM CPUs, GPUs

ARM Holdings plc announced last week that it has licensed a family of intellectual property cores to China's Shanghai InfoTM Micro-electronics. The licensed series includes the ARM11 processor core, Cortex-A5 and Cortex-A9 processor cores as well as the Mali300 and Mali400 graphics processor cores

Shanghai InfoTM is a subsidiary of Shuoying Digital Science & Technology (China) Co. Ltd., which is its main customer. ARM said the licenses would be used to provide 3D graphics in a range of mobile computing devices.

Shanghai InfoTM is expected to have multicore ICs ready later this year to target a range of mobile computing devices ranging from tablet computers to netbooks.

Integrating ARM CPU and GPU IP into product designs delivers optimized coherency and memory bandwidth for higher-performance and more efficient data sharing, ARM said

The Cortex-A9 is likely to be targeted at higher-performance applications while the Cortex-A5 MPCore processor is the most energy-efficient, lowest-cost processor suitable for delivering the Internet to a range of devices from entry-level smartphones to consumer and industrial devices.

- Peter Clarke
??EE Times