Intel and ARM join forces to gain power in the smartphone processor market by empowering Intel's 22nm and 10nm FinFET manufacturing processes.

Despite the pressure from AMD with the Ryzen, the king in the processor market is still Intel. The Santa Clara company has years of advantage over the competition, but the field that has resisted it is that of processors for mobile devices. The different attempts have been quite unsuccessful and of slight impact. This year we have seen how it has also collaborated with Google in the design of Visual Core. Well, Intel and ARM would be working on a closer collaboration in the near future.

During the ARM Tech Con 2017 conferences, the UK-based processor manufacturer gave many details. The event was held at Intel's home in Santa Clara and the deep ties between the two companies were highlighted. Apple has made important leaps this year in terms of smartphone hardware, with the A11 chip, designed in Cupertino and which can run the six processor cores in high performance mode, if necessary. Independence in the processor market gives you larger profit margins and greater autonomy.

The important thing is that this processor is ahead of the solutions of the competition, making the A11 a benchmark processor and shows how far the Cupertino company can go. This makes Intel and ARM want to partner and limit the strength of the competition and therefore they will work together on the 22nm and 10nm architectures. The first of the big announcements is based on the development of a 22nm FinFET node in collaboration with the American giant.

The work will focus on the Cortex A55, allowing it to work at 2.35Ghz with a voltage of 0.45V, thinking of a mid-range smartphone. Intel claims that its 22nm node brings a 30% performance improvement and reduces the size of the Matrix by 20% compared to 28nm. The biggest jump is that of 10nm, which opens doors in the smartphone market. Intel and ARM collaborate in the development of a test 10nm processor, but already thinking about the next generation of Cortex A, which are expected to be ready by the end of 2018.

It seems that this chip will have the capacity to work at 3.5GHz, with a voltage of 0.5W, which gives a consumption of 0.25mW / MHz. The Snapdragon 820 has an approximate consumption of 2W / MHz. This is a great boost to development and the limits of the current Cortex. Intel is the best when it comes to processor nodes and at 10nm, the chips are expected to have more than 100 million transistors. Samsung currently has the capacity to implement 51.6 million transistors and TSMC has the capacity to implement 48 million transistors.

Source: wccftech