14 DAY TRIAL // ARM Holdings seems determined to license its processors to as many chip makers as possible and a recent report claims that the company is now trying to persuade AMD to drop the x86 architecture in favor of its ARM CPU design.
ARM will be one of the key speakers at AMD's upcoming Fusion development conference and its presentation will focus on the company's support for the OpenCL standard.
This lead some to believe that ARM is interested in pushing its ARM cores inside AMD's Fusion architectures in some kind of heterogeneous multiprocessor that will include both x86 and ARM CPU cores as well as an on-die GPU.
AMD could even drop the x86 cores all together in its low-power Fusion chips, which should make them even better suited for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs.
The move could make a lot of sense as current x86 chips aren't able to compete in terms of power draw with their ARM counterparts.
“AMD is a successful company selling microprocessors. ARM is in the business of licensing microprocessor designs,” said ARM CEO Warren East in an interview with EETimes.
“It is perfectly natural that we should have been trying to sell microprocessor designs to AMD for about the last ten years. Hitherto we haven't been successful.
“AMD has signaled they are going through a rethink of their strategy, and that must provide a heightened opportunity for ARM.
“They might use ARM microprocessors in the future and you've got to expect that we would be trying to persuade them of that,” concluded the company's rep.
AMD held an ARM license not so long ago, acquired after it purchased ATI Technologies, but sold its mobile graphics division to Qualcomm for $65 million in early 2009.
At this moment, it is still uncertain what cores ARM wants to license to AMD, but the Cortex-A8 , Cortex-A9 and Cortex-A15 all popped up in the discussion.