14 DAY TRIAL // If you have been following up on Google TV platform development you surely know that Intel is the main chip provider for this type of solutions, a pretty logical decision considering the platform was co-developed by Google, Intel, Sony and Logitech, but this isn't something ARM is particularly found off, the company's president hinting to us that things may change drastically in the not so distant future.
Although nothing is official at this time, during a recent conference that took place in Taipei, Taiwan, ARM President Tudor Brown told journalists that ARM is talking to Google about such a change, although it has nothing to announce right now.
If this is to happen, then Intel may find itself in a pretty awkward situation, the processor giant already finding it hard to compete with the British company when it comes down to low power processing units.
As a matter of fact, ARM based SoC have managed to become the de-facto standard when it comes down to cell phone hardware, the ARM architecture being far better suited for such devices than the x86 microarchitecture used by Intel in its processors.
Furthermore, if we take a look at Intel's Atom CE4100 specifications (the SoC used in Google TV enabled products) we would see this actually uses the same graphics core (PowerVR SGX535) as that found into Apple's iPhone 4 and other smartphones available out there (the Samsung Galaxy S actually comes with a more powerful SGX540 graphics processing unit).
What this basically means is that ARM based SoCs could pretty easily replace the CE4100 chip, as they have the video decoding power necessary to confront Intel's offering while also coming at a lower price point and with a lower power consumption, as Brown noted during the same conference.
Questioned by TechEye.net, both ARM and Google declined to comment on Brown's claims, so nothing is certain at this point, although I can definitely see why would Google decide to go with ARM for future Google TV platforms.