It's going to be "a while" before self-driving cars become mainstream, the CEO of Arm Holdings told CNBC Tuesday. "It is a phenomenally hard problem to anticipate what a car could do under absolutely any set of circumstances," Simon Segars, who was speaking at CNBC's Karen Tso at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, added. "I think you're going to start to see early services, in quite a constrained way, quite soon over the next couple of years," he added, explaining that there was "some way to come" before the technology was "completely mainstream." Over the last few years, the development of technology has led to several trial runs of autonomous vehicles.

In August 2018, for example, the Hyundai Motor announced that the first journey by an autonomous truck on a South Korean highway had taken place. The firm's Xcient truck, which has a maximum load capacity of 40 tons, drove around 40 kilometers between Uiwang and Incheon.



The vehicle used an autonomous driving system that allowed it to accelerate, decelerate, steer and maneuver through traffic without needing input from a human, although one was on board to take control as and when required.



Back in Barcelona, Arm Holdings' Segars gave an insight into the technology required for autonomous vehicles.



"Self-driving cars have … racks of servers in them, that's great for prototyping, but if you want to make millions of them then you've got to shrink it down, so there has to be a pathway to get all of that technology into very low cost, very power efficient chips."