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COMPUTEX 2009: the year of the low power chip

by Scott Bicheno on 3 June 2009, 17:12

Tags: Toshiba (TYO:6502), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), ARM, Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM)

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PR offensive

HEXUS readers may recall our recent interview with Coombs, which was prompted by our coverage of Intel's low power processor plans. He didn't pull its punches then and judging by all the noise ARM is making at Computex this year, this is just the start of a PR offensive by ARM and its partners.

While it's easy to summarise the looming low power processor battle as ARM versus Intel, it's important to remember that they're very different types of company.

So while Intel designs and mostly manufactures its own processors, ARM licenses its designs to other companies, like NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Freescale and Texas Instruments, which then incorporate this IP into their own low power processor platforms.

Hence a big part of ARM's PR effort involves promoting the components its partners have made using ARM designs.

This was why Coombs happened to have a card on him depicting a life-sized photo of NVIDIA's new Tegra module. Here it is next to a phone and a ten pence piece.