Commentary: ARM's Osprey broadens the battle front with Intel

Peter Clarke, EE Times
(09/16/2009 8:00 AM EDT)

LONDON — ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England) has fired off the latest salvo in a battle against Intel Corp. for domination of the world's microprocessor slots and sockets.

The launch of a dual-core Cortex A9 processor hard-macro called Osprey, ready for manufacture by TSMC in a 40-nm general-purpose process, with plenty of comparisons to the current generation of Intel Atom processor, signposts ARM's aspirations — to take Intel on in its traditional performance domain.

Osprey is also clearly aimed at the netbook space, but the argument that by designing in TSMC's 40G process ARM is not going to tread on the toes of some of its semiconductor partners, who are getting ready launch their own Cortex-A9 chips in 40-nm low-leakage processes, is not clear cut.

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