“Consider this: The performance of smartphones, nearly all of which are powered by ARM processors, has grown by 100x since 2009. One hundred times in seven years! With that has emerged entirely new functionality, lightning-fast user responsiveness, and immersive user experiences – all in the same power footprint. It’s really an unrivaled engineering achievement, given the challenging design constraints in the mobile space. This performance, functionality and user experience dynamic has driven a truly remarkable market, which will see more than 1.5 billion handsets sold in 2016. With this consumer embrace, smart phone design has become, in many ways, the platform for future innovation. Augmented and virtual reality, ultra-HD visualization, object-based audio processing or computer vision all underlie the demand for extra system performance. At the same time, smart phone designs have slimmed considerably in recently years, which limits thermal dissipation and ratchets up the need for thoughtful power management design. Battery capacity improvement cannot continue as smartphones have gotten as large as they practically can. To continue delivering more immersive user experiences and staying on the smartphone innovation path we’ve blazed in the past decade, we need to deliver more sustained performance with higher efficiency.”