ARM steps on the accelerator with the autonomous and intelligent car. The British company announced this week the launch of a series of technologies for this type of casesincluding tools software and virtualization, as well as a new range of hardware designed specifically for these needs.
Among the new features are a trio of new nuclei with the last name AE at the end of his name, which means automotive enhanced and is translated into Spanish as optimized for cars. These acronyms, introduced by ARM in 2018 with the presentation of the Cortex-A76AE, are used to designate those designs focused on connected, intelligent or autonomous vehicles.
Three new cores for autonomous cars
The most ambitious of the three new cores is the ARM Neoverse V3AE. This is a variant of the Neoverse V3 chip that the company presented at the beginning of 2024 to meet the demands of servers cloud and edge –a market in which ARM increasingly has more weight–. This AE version, as ARM explains, allows those who implement it to have their own server processing capacity for any task related to artificial intelligence, autonomous driving or driving assistance.
The British company has also presented the Cortex-A720AE and Cortex-A520AE. These are based on the Cortex-A720 and Cortex-A520, two widely known cores that we find in chips for mobile phones such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The Cortex-A720AE offers slightly more performance, while the Cortex-A520AE offers lower energy consumption.
On the other hand, ARM has presented the Cortex-R82AE –a real-time processor– and the Mali-C720AEa configurable ISP to process any image signal coming from cameras or sensors in the car.
ARM wants to be key in the autonomous car
All of these elements can be combined in different ways to achieve high-performance SoCs that meet the needs of automotive companies. Likewise, it is important to clarify that ARM does not manufacture such processors. The company is dedicated to creating the designs and, once its work is completed, other companies carry it out. A dynamic similar to what we find in mobile telephony. ARM designs the Cortex cores and, subsequently, companies like Samsung or Qualcomm implement them in the SoCs that finally reach the market.
Together with these three new nuclei, ARM has announced an entire offer of software and virtualization systems that facilitate the work of the entire supply chain partners and, in addition, seeks to accelerate the times necessary to bring new technologies to the market.
Among the brands that will make use of these ARM developments are Marvell, MediaTek, NVIDIA, NXP, Renesas, Telechips and Texas Instruments, the company explains in a statement.
Considering the strong transformation that the automobile industry is going through – and will go through –, It is no surprise that ARM steps on the accelerator in this matter and tries to be the preferred partner of all companies in the sector.. An objective that makes even more sense considering that the mobile phone market – the goose that laid the golden eggs during the last decade – barely grows – and even decreases in some quarters – due to the high maturity reached by the market.