A lot of you have heard of Intel, they do have over 80% of today’s processor market share, but does anymore remember AMD? Advanced Micro Devices, based in Texas, was losing money, a lot of money, and they decided to spin off their factories into a separate company, which was then pumped full of cash from the Middle East, called Global Foundries. AMD today just designs chips; they make blueprints for what they want, which then get turned over to Global Foundries who makes processors. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, Global Foundries’ factories, known as fabs, short for processor fabrication, never really run at 100% capacity, meaning there is room for other companies to come and say: “Hey, can you make chips for us?”
Yesterday Global Foundries announced that they’ve purchased a licence (the blueprint) to make ARM’s Cortex A9 processor. Not only that, but Global Foundries is going to make the A9 on a 28 nanometer process, meaning each transistor is only 28 nanometers wide, and that’s bloody small compared to today’s 90 nm and 65 nm parts. While most companies are only now transitioning for 45 nm, this leap to 28 nm will make the A9 processor highly competitive in power usage and yields per wafer (number of chips that can be sold per silicon wafer). All this techno mumbo jumbo aside, what this signifies to you is that the next generation of mobile processors will be super power efficient and probably very cheap too. With the ARM Cortex A8 only shipping now, it’s inside the Apple iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, Nokia N900, it may be a while until we see the A9. But when it does come, be prepared for another huge leap in performance.
[Via: Ars.Technica]