Many of you may not immediately recognise the word "Globalfoundries" but this is the fab company spun off by AMD last year - they have recently announced that they will begin offering their customers ARM's Cortex A9 processor on the 28nm process. This will improve the ARM's top end core meaning it can finally take on Intel's popular Atom CPU. ARM PR, have also taken the time to state that Adobe Flash 10.1 is now available on its processors which is an answer to a previous Intel public announcement that the Atom is more powerful than ARM due to the fact that the Atom "runs the full Internet". Additionally, yesterdays announcement hints that AMD may be a possible Cortex A9 user because AMD are still Globalfoundries main customer. Some of you may remember that the ARM based SoCs contained DX10 compatible graphics technology that went under the name of Imageon - this was well in advance of Nvidia's Tegra. AMD sold their Imageon division to Qualcomm which was an unusual decision in such a growing market. We can assume that due to this removal from the ARM based business that AMD will be unlikely to leap back into the SoC through Globalfoundries although in reality Globalfoundries doesn't actually need AMD to use ARM to make it viable in the bigger picture because STMicro has recently signed on with them and the new company is also buying Chartered Semiconductor a large foundry which has Broadcomm and Qualcomm as customers. -Allan Campbell, Heaven Media
Nice to hear that Atom will get competition at last. Almost all of my smart phones had ARM cpu in them. Current one is the ARM1136J(F)-S cpu. I'm hoping to see Nokia smart phone with the Cortex A9 cpu but currently they don't have any plans to use it in the future, the N900 has it in use. I think that it would work nicely on their high-end multimedia/web phones.
