ARM takes advantage of GloFo's 28nm prowess.
Ever since the deal between AMD and the Advanced Technology Investment Company in Abu Dhabi resulted in the formation of GlobalFoundries we've not had much of a shakeup in the processor world, but all that appears to be changing.
Designer of small mobile processors ARM has just penned a deal with GloFo to manufacture their Cortex A9 SoC processors exclusively on the 28nm manufacturing process that appears to be relatively mature at this stage.
Apart from bringing an incredibly low cost thanks to the teensy process, it also allows any other customer of GloFo to add their own elements to the ARM A9 chip through deals with ARM and add in their own specialised components.
This means that we could potentially get custom-designed smartphone processors coming in at the smallest process yet, and the recent addition of Adobe Flash 10.1 support to the ARM design mean that it has full hardware acceleration for Flash.
It's a great sign to see GloFo getting some more diverse customers, exactly what they need to be competitive against TSMC (the fab that Intel and other GPU manufacturers use) and grow their market share - as well as giving ARM a direct competitive product against Intel's Atom chip.
Head over to Arstechnica to read some more about ARM's Cortex chip, and what it could mean for mobile computing.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012