China's Nufront licenses leading ARM cores

LONDON – Nufront Co. Ltd. (Beijing, China), one of the many fabless chip companies to emerge in China in the last decade, has licensed the the performance leading cores processor and graphics cores from ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge England). These are the multicore-capable Cortex-A15 and the Mali-T658 graphics core, which is also capable of being used for some general purpose computing purposes.

NuFront, founded in 2004, rose to prominence in 2010 when it was revealed that it had worked with ARM on the development of a computer SoC; a dual-core Cortex-A9 implemented in 40-nm silicon and capable of operating at clock frequencies of up to 2-GHz. That processor was targeted at ultra-thin laptops, netbooks and tablet computers.

The use of Cortex-A15 and Mali-T658 should enable Nufront to offer hardware capable of supporting 3-D graphics, visual computing, augmented reality and voice recognition.

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"The new licenses for Cortex-A15 processor and Mali-T658 GPU technology will enable Nufront to broaden our portfolio of capabilities to better address trends we see emerging in mobile products. At the same time, the new technology will allow Nufront to leverage its strengths in the WCDMA baseband market to help mobile OEMS deliver the functions and features for future users needs," said said Rock Yang, vice president of marketing at Nufront in a statement issued by ARM.

It was not made clear how long Nufront has had the licenses or how soon Nufront would have silicon including the ARM cores.

Nufront is included in version 13.0 of the Silicon 60 list of emerging startups published by EE Times. Nufront entered the Silicon 60 at version 12.0 in April 2011.


Related links and articles:

www.nufront.com

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