Stefan Mileschin

Sure it's British, but ARM's mobile empire is being built through careful alliances rather than conquest. The chip designer's latest deal with Globalfoundries, which mirrors a very similar agreement signed with rival foundry TSMC last month, is a case in point. It's designed to promote the adoption of fast, energy-efficient 20nm processors by making it easy for chip makers (like Samsung, perhaps) to knock on Globalfoundries' door for the grunt work of actually fabricating the silicon -- since the foundry will now be prepped to produce precisely that type of chip. As far as the regular gadget buyer is concerned, all this politicking amounts to one thing: further reassurance that mobile processor shrinkage isn't going to peter out after the new 32nm Exynos chips or the 28nm Snapdragon S4 -- it's going to push on past the 22nm benchmark that Ivy Bridge already established in the desktop sphere and hopefully deliver phones and tablets that do more with less juice.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/13/a...out-20nm-deal/