Arm said to be working on a gaming-focused dGPU
A new report form Israeli news outlet Globes suggests Arm could be entering the lucrative dGPU market to compete against the likes on Intel, Nvidia and AMD. While Arm is no stranger to graphics with its established line of Mali and Immortalis SKUs, they are primarily developed for low-power Arm-based smartphone SoCs.
Its foray into the dedicated GPU market will be spearheaded by a team of 100 researchers based out of Israel, the report adds. Exactly what stage of development the mystery GPU is unknown, but if it is real, we could see it debut alongside Arm's in-house laptop chip, which is also said to be in the works.
Plus, that's pretty much the only place it has in the market as Qualcomm is likely to ditch Adreno for its Snapdragon X Elite SKUs and MediaTek has already teamed up with Nvidia for its GPU needs. Even AMD's rumoured Arm-based Sound Wave chips have no reason to deviate from Radeon.
Interestingly, the report explicitly says, "graphic processing for the video game market", ruling out the possibility of it being an AI accelerator. So far, Arm-based PCs have been underwhelming for gamers, and the company could be looking to tap into that niche market. Nevertheless, it'll be interesting to see how much firepower the chip packs because Arm will have a tough time keeping power consumption low; otherwise, it kind of defeats the purpose of a 'battery efficient' Arm laptop.