ARM Announces New Immortalis Mobile GPU With Ray-Tracing Support

Arm recently announced its latest flagship GPU, the Immortalis-G715. The new mobile GPU is the first of its kind to implement hardware-based ray tracing for mobile.

The Immortalis-G715 signals ARM’s shift in bringing its products into the mainstream, in the same way that Sony and Microsoft brought ray-tracing to their respective consoles. Specs-wise, the new mobile GPU is built on top of Mali and designed to accommodate between 10 and 16-cores, with a promised performance boost of up to 15% over previous generation Mali GPUs. This is alongside double the architectural machine learning (ML) improvements. 

With the presence of hardware accelerated ray-tracing, Andy Craigen, director of Product Management at ARM. says that the Immortalis-G715 will use approximately 4% of power per the shader core area while delivering more than 300% performance improvement. The trade-off here is that the Immortalis can and will use significant power, energy, and area within the SoC it is attached to.

The company has not provided any more particular details on what devices the Immortalis-G715 will be featured in, but you may expect that the first phones that have them will arrive at the beginning of 2023. 

Moving on, Arm also announced the Mali-G715 and Mali-G615 as premium GPUs, which are aimed at devices with lesser pricing, but with fewer cores and no ray tracing support. The Mali-G615 has 6 cores or less while the Mali-G715 has 7 to 9 cores respectively, but unlike the Immortalis-G715, they will only have Variable Rate Shading that provides up to 40% on frames per second (FPS) and Execution Engine.

ARM also gave a glimpse of its roadmap, which said that it plans on following up Immortalis other flagship mobile GPU next year, codenamed “Titan”, while it plans on bringing “Krake” in 2024. The chipmaker did not indicate if it intends to extend the same hardware-based ray-tracing to the other two.

NVIDIA Shows Off RTX On ARM Using A MediaTek Chromebook CPU Paired With RTX 3060

If you are a gamer or PC hardware enthusiast, you most probably are well-aware of what NVIDIA RTX technologies are all about especially real-time ray tracing. Aside from having the appropriate GeForce RTX graphics cards, you also generally need a capable x86-64 processor too in order to utilise them but NVIDIA is now working to bring the RTX tech to ARM-based processors as well.

At the ongoing Game Developers Conference, the company has unveiled two demonstrations of RTX on ARM including one that utilises Wolfenstein: Youngblood. According to NVIDIA, both demos were run on a system that is equipped with a MediaTek Kompanio 1200 processor and a GeForce RTX 3060 GPU.

NVIDIA pointed out that there were five key RTX technologies that were being showcased in these demos including DLSS as well as RTX Direct Illumination, RTX Global Illumination, RTX Memory Utility, and NVIDIA Optix AI-Acceleration Denoiser. However, the company noted that MachineGames and Bethesda Softworks have no plans to put out the ARM version of Wolfenstein: Youngblood that was used for the demo as a commercial release though.

Considering that the Kompanio 1200 is essentially a Chromebook processor, what NVIDIA is trying to achieve here is indeed pretty interesting as it may lead to a future whereby an ARM-based device could become a decent gaming PC. That could be a fairly fruitful future for NVIDIA beyond its role as a GPU company since ARM is about to become a part of NVIDIA soon, although the acquisition deal has been met with resistance by a lot of parties including the UK government.

Qualcomm Showing Interest To Invest In ARM If The NVIDIA-Softbank Deal Fails

NVIDIA’s plan to acquire Softbank’s Cambridge-based chip manufacturer ARM has been placed on indefinite hold, as we’ve previously covered back in April. The block was issued by UK regulators, citing that the acquisition was grounds for national security concerns. 

Speaking to The Telegraph newspaper on Sunday, Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon expressed that the company is open to the idea of investing in ARM, provided that the NVIDIA-Softbank deal fails. “If ARM has an independent future, I think you will find there is a lot of interest from a lot of the companies within the ecosystem, including Qualcomm, to invest in [the company],” he explained. Concurrently, the CEO said that Qualcomm has had discussions with others “that feel the same way”, but did not name these would-be investors.

“If it moves out of SoftBank and it goes into a process of becoming a publicly-traded company, [with] a consortium of companies that invest, including many of its customers, I think those are great possibilities,” Amon added. When reached out by CNBC in regards to Qualcomm’s suggestion, NVIDIA commented that an Initial Public Offering (IPO) wouldn’t be enough to support ARM’s growth.

The UK-based chip manufacturer, which runs on an open-licensing model, maintains a neutral approach towards its wide range of tech industry clients. Those that are relying on ARM’s semiconductor business include key players such as Apple, Samsung, and even NVIDIA’s closest rival AMD. Suffice to say, NVIDIA’s plan to buy off ARM from Softbank was met with a huge backlash from these tech giants, who share the same concern of a potential monopoly.

Addressing this, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang promised that the company would respect and not hinder ARM’s business practices and neutrality after the acquisition. However, as mentioned earlier, Huang’s words failed to convince the concerned parties and eventually led to the deal’s current state of limbo.

UK Government Officially Blocks NVIDIA Acquisition of ARM

Back in January this year, regulators based in the UK announced that it was investigating the takeover of its Cambridge-based semiconductor maker, ARM, by the US-based GPU maker, NVIDIA. As of today, that acquisition has officially been halted by the country’s Crown.

As of yesterday, the UK’s Secretary of State issued a public interest intervention notice (PIIN), citing that such an acquisition was grounds for national security concerns. Specifically, it brings up a Section 42 within the country’s Enterprise Act 2002; the act states that the government may suspend any acquisition of a UK-based facility if there is reasonable doubt that two or more enterprises will cease to be distinct; there is fear that the purchasing entity will bring the acquired enterprise under their ownership and therefore, erasing what makes them unique; and if the value of the company being acquired has a turnover value that exceeds £1 million (~RM5.76 million).

NVIDIA announced its plans to purchase ARM from the Softbank Group (SoftBank) back in September last year, agreeing to purchase the semiconductor maker for a handsome sum of US$40 billion (~RM 164 billion). In its decision to acquire the chipmaker, the GPU brand promised that it would not put a crimp into ARM’s open-licensing model and customer neutrality, of which it counts AMD, Apple, Samsung, and Google as some of its major clients.

Sadly, NVIDIA’s word wasn’t enough of a promise and like clockwork, several tech giants inevitably began expressing concern about the potential acquisition and while UK-based regulatory bodies began investigating the deal and the possible repercussion it could have on the semiconductor industry, as a whole.

Tech Giants Raise Concerns Over NVIDIA Acquisition Of ARM

Several tech giants are beginning to express their concern over NVIDIA’s acquisition of the UK semiconductor maker, ARM. The list of anxious players includes Microsoft, Google, and even Qualcomm.

It’s a matter several regulatory bodies in several countries have also expressed concern about, with the US’ own Federal Trade Commission (FTC) having recently begun its own in-depth probe into the deal.

NVIDIA confirmed back in September that it would be acquiring ARM for a sum of US$40 billion (~RM161.7 billion) from Softbank. Unsurprisingly, there are growing fears over NVIDIA’s acquisition of ARM, specifically in regards to how the former would handle patents and distribution rights of the latter, post-merger; ARM supplies its chip technology to virtually every major tech giant in the world and counts companies like AMD, Apple, Samsung, and Google as some of its biggest customers.

In regards to the issue, Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, has gone on the record to say that NVIDIA would respect and not hinder ARM’s open-licensing model and customer neutrality. At best, the acquisition would mean that ARM chips in the future could simply carry the “NVIDIA” branding on them.

As to why NVIDIA chose to bring ARM under its fold, the brand said that it intends on using ARM chip to advance and expand its AI innovations further. To that end, it also promised that it will build a new supercomputer in the UK chipmaker’s home of Cambridge.