Chipmaker ARM, which provides a good portion of the chips that power smartphones today, is now offering free software to Android developers seeking to optimize their code for ARM processors.

ARM Development Studio 5  (or DS-5) Community Edition makes the main features of the premium version available to individual developers and small smartups. The toolkit includes a debugger designed for code generated using Android’s C/C++-based native development kit (NDK). It provides a graphical interface in addition to streaming processor data using ARM Neon Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) registers.

ARM’s new framework doesn’t leave Java programmers out of the loop entirely, allowing them to work with Java and C/C++ at the same time using Eclipse.

Lastly, the community edition of DS-5 also has comes with some handy performance analytics tool called Streamline.

“Streamline captures detailed, system-wide performance statistics from a variety of sources, which helps developers to locate hotspots in their code and isolate potential causes. Platform builders can add support for Streamline by integrating an open source driver available from the Linaro website.”

ARM’s latest launch further strengthens the company’s grip on the mobile market, and follows a rather significant hardware announcement that was published late last month. The chipmaker revealed some of the specs of its upcoming 64-bit ARMv8 architecture, which will follow the tradition of being compatible with a broad spectrum of electronics, including mobile devices.

ARM has a rather strong position in the mobile space now, but rival Intel (which has its chips in most of the devices in several categories, including PCs) is pushing in this direction as well. In particular, its upcoming 22nm Ivy bridge processors is something ARM and other competitors will have to look out for – likely around April 2012, based on a report by PCR.