ARM’s next-gen chip design puts the focus on artificial intelligence

ARM tipped its hand today with the announcement of DynamIQ, a new technology it says will lay the groundwork for its next generation of mobile processors. Like other mobile chip makers, the company’s got a lot to contend with when it comes to future-proofing its offerings, and certainly ARM’s making some pretty big claims for what it’s calling its “biggest micro-architectural shift since […] 2011”

Central to the company’s speed boasts are its focus on future artificial intelligence, an aspect of technology that will continue to grow more central to mobile computing over the next several years, both through the proliferation of smart-assistants, autonomous vehicles and beyond.

The chipmaker certainly isn’t being modest in its AI claims, with a stated 50x boost in performance for the technology over the next three to five years, a number it says is potentially “conservative […] as its only building out projections based on AI algorithms they know about or have access to.”

Nor is ARM understated in its planned ubiquity for the technology. As with offerings from other mobile chip makers, the company is targeting a wide range of different computing platforms that move well beyond mobile. And certainly it’s well positioned to deliver on that front, having already proven itself a versatile component maker during the explosion of IoT devices over the past several years.

The company is positioning DynamIQ chips for cars (accounting for the added workload of autonomous vehicles) and connected home devices, in addition to smartphones and the like. Microsoft has already laid some of the groundwork for additional applications back in December when it announced that it would be bringing its apps to the company’s mobile processors, in an attempt to get hardware makers to build a wider variety of devices for the operating system.

Redmond also gave ARM a little bit more love last week when it announced that it would allow for Windows Server OS to run on the company’s chips. That news was a bit of a preview of today’s announcement, as the DynamIQ architecture sees the company pushing even further into server/cloud computing hardware, along with newfound networking applications.

ARM’s not giving exact dates for the technology’s anticipated arrival, only stating that it expects its hardware partners to ship an additional 100 billion ARM-based chips by the year 2021, having shipped roughly half that number between 2013 and 2017.