Industry Expert Blogs

The Linley Group, whose conference on mobile I recently attended, has some interesting data about the processor core market. Firstly, the numbers are big: CPU cores shipped in over 10 billion chips last year which is up 25% on last. ARM has a share of 78% of that entire market. The big surprise to me was the #2 was not MIPS but Synopsys with the ARC processor that they acquired with Virage. They have a 10% share. MIPS can only manage 6%.

ARM licensees shipped 7.9 billions chips on which ARM collected an average royalty of 4.6¢ down a little from 4.8¢ the year before. By contrast, MIPS licensees shipped just 650M chips although they made around 7¢ per chip.

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