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Once upon a time there was a company called Advanced Micro Devices. Their largest competitor was Intel. Both companies competed not only on who made the fastest processor, but who made the best processor manufacturing plants that the world has ever seen. These massive, expensive, difficult to build factories are called fabs. AMD was losing money, and fast, because Intel wasn’t playing fair. They gave their customers incentives to keep on buying Intel chips, and to avoid AMD all together. AMD took Intel to court and won, but the damage was already done and AMD split up. AMD is still AMD, but they don’t make their own chips anymore. They sold their fabs, and now they’re operating under a new name: Global Foundries.
Global Foundries called up ARM one day and said: “You stinky Brit, we’re making 28 nanometer transistors, and we know the next biggest thing is the mobile space, so can we get some of your Cortex A9 intellectual property?” To which ARM replied: “What? What? Yes! Yes! Cheerio!”
And with that the 28 nanometer ARM Cortex A9 was born, offering 40% faster performance, while also reducing power consumption by 30%. Expect to see processor coming out of Global Foundries during the second half of this year, and possibly end up in devices you’ll be able to purchase during 2011.
[Via: ARM]
About The Author
Stefan Constantinescu
Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.
