ARM has unveiled a serious upgrade to its multicore processor IP family, with the launch of DynamIQ, a new way of combining up to eight cores in flexible ways, according to the needs of a particular application. Pitching it at artificial intelligence and automotive developers, ARM is claiming a monumental shift in multicore micro-architectures, going well beyond its current core-combining approach, big.Little. Although many licensees use big.Little to balance power consumption and performance by combining different types of core, some architectural licensees, like Qualcomm, have devised their own approaches and claimed ARM’s is too limited. The Softbank-owned company will hope to silence such criticisms and incorporate DynamIQ in a large proportion of the 100bn chips it hopes to enable in…