SoftBank, a multinational investment company based out of Tokyo, saw its shares soar by 8.2% on Monday after Arm, a chip designer firm owned by SoftBank, rolled out new technology for mobile devices.
This is the biggest jump in SoftBank’s stock price in more than a year.
MediaTek, a Taiwan-based smartphone chip manufacturer that enables nearly 2 billion devices a year, said that it will be partnering with Arm for its next-generation smartphones, according to a report by Reuters.
MediaTek has been a longtime supplier of low and mid-tier smartphone chips and has been pushing into the market to supply chips for premium smartphones. The same market was once dominated by rival Qualcomm Inc, which has been in a legal battle with Arm since last year over chip licensing agreements, further said the Reuters report.
After the announcement, MediaTek’s Taiwan-listed shares went up by 1%
Arm announced a slew of new products in a blog post. First up, a new chip, ‘Immortalis-G720,’ which Arm says is its "most performant and efficient GPU ever." To be used for video image processing and AI-based apps, the chip will deliver 15% more performance than its previous generation. It also boasts of a 40% improvement in system-level efficiency, which means higher quality graphics for more immersive visual experiences, said the company blog post.
Another product announced was the Arm Cortex-X4, the company’s fastest CPU, with 15 percent more performance compared to the Cortex-X3, its predecessor. "These performance and efficiency gains bring the on-device experiences, like UI responsiveness and application launch time, to the next level and enable next-gen AI and ML-based applications," explained the company.
Arm is in the business of supplying intellectual property to chip designers in mobile phones and also has partnerships with major chip contract manufacturers.
During a briefing, the company was asked by Reuters if the new development meant that Arm was making a chip to sell instead of its long-time business model of providing the blueprint to chip makers. Chris Bergey, the general manager of Arm's Client Line of Business, said this was a step it sometimes takes to help test out new manufacturing technology for customers.
"Arm is not in the business of selling chips. That's not what we do," he added.
