Posted on Monday, March 16 2009 @ 0:05 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Hexus
had a chat with ARM regarding Intel's announcement that it will start using Taiwanese foundry TSMC for the
production of Atom SoCs. ARM director of mobile computing Bob Morris says Intel's move is designed to lower costs, in order to be able to compete into the lower cost area of mobile chips:
"Intel had to move into a lower cost area," said Morris. "They're very good at making fast, hot processors but now they're having to move to a model we've been working on for the past 19 years. Intel's a company that, once it picks an area, goes at it pretty hard. But they're going to have to do something to reduce cost."
Understandably, Morris was reluctant to speculate much further on what Intel's plans might be, but he was quick to stress that "TSMC is a very close partner of ours," and that "partners may go to other foundries."
We wondered if he might be referring to the company newly spun-off from AMD - GLOBALFOUNDRIES - but Morris wouldn't be drawn. However, we thought it significant that the first company, apart from AMD, to indicate it would be working with GLOBALFOUNDIES was ARM.
