ARM takes aim at Intel, sends Cortex A9 to GlobalFoundries

By Jon Stokes October 6, 2009

AMD's fab spinoff, GlobalFoundries, has announced a deal with ARM to make the latter's Cortex A9 parts available on the former's 28nm half-node process. This makes GlobalFoundries the first company to work with ARM on a 28nm A9 implementation, and it's a win for ARM because it makes any GlobalFoundries customers into potential ARM customers. A bit of background: an system-on-a-chip (SoC) provider who is already using GlobalFoundries to produce its SoCs can more easily mix its own technology with ARM's to produce SoCs based on Cortex A9. This is the same reason that Intel ported Atom to TSMC—so that existing TSMC customers can also mix Atom with their own IP to make Atom-based SoCs. (Of course, what was a shocking move for Intel is standard procedure for ARM, which is a fabless semi company whose total revenues are less than what Intel spends to develop one processor.) ARM PR, for its part, took this opportunity to once again remind everyone that Adobe Flash 10.1 is now available on its processors. This is a direct slap at the now-inoperable Intel talking point that Atom is better than ARM because only Atom "runs the full Internet." This talking-point was actually still in use at last month's IDF, despite the fact that everyone there knew that it was essentially nonsense.

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