Straight from the salt mountains of Chile, we have a juicy rumor to report. Unnamed sources speaking to the folks over at Semi Accurate are saying that Texas Instruments is in the process of selling their OMAP division and that AMD is one of the few companies that couple potentially be the buyer. While most of you have never heard the acronym OMAP (Open Multimedia Application Platform) before, it’s one of the world’s most popular chipsets for building mobile phones. Now yes, nearly 60% of all Android devices as of Q1 2011 have Qualcomm inside, but if you look at the total mobile market, including the relatively new tablet space, TI has enough of their chips in today’s products to be considered a major player. Now the really interesting bit here is that AMD is thought to be a buyer. Think of how crazy that would be if a chip vendor known for making hardware that gets shoved inside laptops, desktops, and servers, started making mobile chips. What’s more likely to happen is AMD will make multicore ARM processors that can run ARM compatible future versions of Windows, which will likely include a server product SKU.
One of the commenters on the Semi Accurate article suggested that Google would be a perfect buyer. They build their own custom server farms, and with ARM can drastically reduce power consumption. That and Google can start designing their own chips, optimized for Android, which they then resell to anyone who is interested. Such a scenario would be wild to say the least, but then again Google is working on self driving cars, so what exactly is considered batshit crazy considering that context?
When is this deal likely to go down? We’ve got absolutely no freaking idea, and for all we know this rumor is total hogwash, but be sure that we’ll be watching this space for further development.