Though Intel is quite bent on snatching some of ARM's smartphone chip share, Advanced Micro Devices is apparently disinclined to engage ARM Holdings in this area, being, instead, content with powering tablets and staying out of the mobile SoC market.

Intel has, for some time, been striving to bring out an Atom chip capable of powering smartphones and compete with the ARM architecture in terms of energy efficiency.

Now, it is revealed, among other things, that Advanced Micro Devices, while it has no plans to compete with ARM in that field, will address the growing market of tablets.

Most likely the Bobcat/Ontario products will be the first step towards entering this segment, though a strong push is unlikely.

One of the possible reasons for AMD's cautious attitude is that, while Intel seeks to enter the smartphone business and ARM aims for servers, neither company will have an easy time of achieving their intended purpose.

AMD may or may not decide to enter the slate segment depending on demand and its rivals' plans for this area.

"I do not foresee that day [when AMD competes with ARM is] coming in the near term. First of all, when we consider which areas to approach, we look at markets, we look at the technology capabilities we have, and we try to find an intersection point that really represents really big opportunities,” said Dirk Meyer, chief executive officer and president of AMD, in an interview with the Fortune magazine.

“By far the biggest business opportunity we have got is in PCs and servers. The market for silicon processing content is bigger than the smartphone market,” he went on to saying.

“The other thing we really like about our core market is that there aren't that many competitors [...]. I would rather focus on the big market, where there's a small number of competitors," he explained.