Forbes is reporting that Arm Holdings has taken a major step toward helping its processors compete even better and make them more appealing to customers.
Arm designs processors and then licenses those designs to companies for use in their products. ARM CPUs are used across the entire computing spectrum, although they are most widely used in mobile devices, such as phones and tablets.
According to Forbes’ report, Arm announced that it is opening its CPU cores to allow licensees to add custom instructions via a special block that’s integrated into the CPU’s cores. This will allow licensees to optimize chips for power, energy, differentiation and reduced costs. Best of all, thanks to how Arm is implementing the custom instructions, the reliability, security and predictability of the processors is unaffected.
This will be a boon to companies who want the benefits of utilizing an existing design—rather than starting from scratch—but need more customization than is offered by standard, third-party chips.
The first chip with the new capability, the Cortex M33, is due out in 2020.