ARM Ships One Billion Chips in Three Months, Double Profits

Some may have been skeptical about the odds about a year and a half ago, but it looks like ARM's gambit to expand its horizons to bigger devices has paid off very well, according to its recent financial results.

People who assumed that ARM was doing well for itself have been proven right by the company's latest financial report.

While, during the third quarter of 2010, the company gathered up £14.8 million in profits ($23.64 million / 17.01 million Euro), it was able to reach £31.5 million ($50.4 million / 36.20 million Euro) in Q3 of 2011. In other words, ARM's profits doubled year-on-year.

“In the third quarter of 2011, we saw a continued high level of design activity with many new customers licensing ARM technology for the first time, driven by end market requirements for smarter, low-power chips,” said chief executive Warren East.

“Demand for our technology has come from a broad range of applications, from sensors to computers. Over the last year we have seen strong growth in shipments of ARM technology based chips, with a 50% increase of shipments into non-mobile markets such as digital TVs, microcontrollers and networking applications.”

Overall, ARM seems to be seeing more success at entering the tiers of larger product than Intel has had in its efforts to gain a share of the mobile market,

The next battleground will obviously be the generation of tablets running Windows 8, since both x86 and ARM chips are supported.

Intel also wants to make a phone chip that can match ARM in terms of power efficiency.

Of course, it bears mentioning that Intel has seen a very favorable third quarter as well, even in absence of real success in this area.

More specifically, it too scored record profits and revenue (we covered the story in detail in this article).