LG looking to enter mobile chip war against Nvidia and Samsung

LG News Android, thumbnail 1We’ve been brought up to see competition as a good thing - it theory, the more companies fighting it out for our hard-earned cash, the better quality the goods.

So the news that LG has decided to leap onboard the mobile chip train by licensing ARM technology should be welcomed as a positive step - sort of (I’ll get to that in a second).

The South Korean giant has previously used Nvidia’s Tegra 2 in its flagship handsets like the Optimus 2x, but this is likely to change now that it has licensed both the latest ARM processors - the Cortex A15 and A9 - and ARM's own GPU, Mali, for manufacture.

We haven’t seen a phone running the Mali GPU for a while now (an earlier version did appear in the LG Viewty) so it should be interesting if ARM’s own graphics technology can match up to Imagination Tech and Nvidia’s efforts in benchmarks.

Of course, the one real negative for gamers is that an extra chip on the market means even more variables when it comes to whether new games will run on your phone, especially if it packs a different GPU from the rest.