ARM develops new chip for driverless cars

Tech giant ARM Holdings today entered the race to power driverless cars as it launched a new chip — one of the first big innovations since the Cambridge company was snapped up for £24 billion by Japan’s SoftBank last year.

It’s already helped to revolutionise the phone market — more than 85% of the world’s most sophisticated smartphones use ARM chips — now it’s taking on robots, artificial intelligence software and autonomous cars.

Its new design, DynamIQ, is aimed at complex computing tasks such as these — areas where rivals Intel and IBM have recently launched specialist chips.

The DynamIQ processor will work to ensure that a driverless vehicle reacts safely in the event of a failure when there is no human to step in, ARM claimed.

Its new design could also be used in data centers, a lucrative market long-dominated by Intel.

ARM’s Nandan Nayampally, general manager of its Compute Products Group, claimed that within five years the new design will perform as much as 50 times better on artificial intelligence tasks than the existing chips on the market.