ARM has said that co-founder and President Tudor Brown will retire in May 2012 after helping turn the firm into a dominant mobile processor company.

An open-source hardware group on Monday announced a US$89 credit-card sized motherboard based on an ARM processor that could be used for robotics, gaming and medical devices.

Qualcomm has announced that its Snapdragon mobile processors power the first Nokia Lumia smartphones, the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 710.

Reports that Apple would ditch Samsung and look instead to TSMC for the Apple A6 processor expected to feature in the next-gen iPad 3 and iPhone 5 are premature, a Samsung exec has insisted, claiming that the two companies will continue to collaborate on chipset design and manufacture.

They also discovered that the iPhone 4S includes a Skyworks 77464-20 chip and Avago ACPM-7181 power amplifier.

Toshiba America Electronic Components has announced the second-generation of its Visconti series of image recognition processors for automotive applications.

Such technology could be useful in power-sucking data centers and handheld devices with limited batter life, such as smartphone sand tablets, obviously. It could also be used for processors that don't rely on electricity from the grid, according to Intel, scavenging power from light and motion in the environment around them.

A solar cell the size of a stamp. That's all Intel researchers needed to power a computer processor that could hold a tantalizing vision for the low-power chips of the future.

Apple's latest chip technology won't appear in the next-generation iPad until June 2012 at the earliest, according to a firm that tracks the mobile processor industry.

Rama Skukla, VP of Intel's architecture group, said during his keynote address to the SEMICON West conference in San Francisco that tablets are disappearing, and that the kind of devices we will be using a decade from now "could not be described." Intel is gearing up for this change, and the next five years will see major advances in processor technology, he added.

TSMC may first appear, in the fourth quarter, as a second-source supplier of the A5 processor, according to Gus Richard, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, who wrote about this in a research note last month and still maintains this outlook. Then TSMC would take on the next-gen A6.

Startup chip design company Adapteva has announced the multicore Epiphany processor, which is designed to accelerate applications in servers and low-power devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Smartphones and tablets will be the first devices to use ARM's upcoming Cortex-A15 processor, and will be available starting late 2012 or early 2013, said James Bruce, the US mobile segment manager at ARM.

According to Samsung South Korea, the smartphone maker "will be releasing a smartphone that boasts performance levels matching desktop PCs." That's because this upcoming device will come equipped with a dual-core processor running at 2GHz.

Taiwan's UMC will take the "lead role" in making the OMAP 5 device on a foundry basis for TI, said Kevin Ritchie, senior VP and manager of TI's technology and manufacturing group. For the OMAP 5, TI may work with other foundries, but Samsung does not appear to be one of the candidates. With the OMAP 4, TI has been "dissatisfied" with its foundry arrangement with Samsung, Ritchie said.

Rumors circulated that Apple may have chosen to TSMC as their new fab in response to new competition from Samsung in the handset and tablet space. Based on analysis performed by UBM TechInsights Lab and Process Analysis personnel, we can say that the A5 in our possession is definitely manufactured by Samsung using their 45nm process.

The processor used in the smartphones, the PXA920, was introduced by Marvell a year ago, and Marvell said it's the first single-chip offering for TD-SCDMA.

The chipmaker made the announcement Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress, where it also introduced mobile communications chips for phones. Medfield is Intel's second smartphone processor. The first, Moorestown, did not have much success in the market due to power consumption too high for smartphones.

The new naming system will be first applied to the dual-core processor codenamed Orion, which was announced in September 2010. Carrying the name Exynos 4210, Samsung's 1GHz dual-core application processor is scheduled for production in March.

The TI OMAP 5 offers quad-core computing at up to 2GHz with power consumption barely breaking into double-digit wattage figures. In terms of raw figures, that level of performance is very near that of current Intel and AMD desktop chips.

Texas Instruments has admitted that Nvidia beat it to market with the first dual-core processor for tablets. This is surprising statement from a company that has been in the business of building power-efficient chips based on the ARM design for close to two decades.

Tilera, among the first in a growing number of processor makers looking to manufacture non-x86 chips for servers in cloud computing and other high-performance environments, is getting more support from a number of capital venture companies and tech vendors like Cisco Systems and Samsung.

The agreement extends access for ARM to assure early time-to-market readiness of the necessary platform of physical and processor IP solutions for nodes ranging from 20nm through 14nm.

Ingenic-designed MIPS-based SoCs are, for example, built into Velocity Micro's Cruz Tablets. The connection represented by MIPS-Ingenic-Velocity Micro illustrates an emerging paradigm in the consumer electronics market: A China-developed processor is driving a host of new consumer devices, while a big ODM community based in greater China (i.e. Foxconn) designs and manufactures them, which are, then, promoted by US-based marketing companies like Velocity Micro, who cultivate channel connections with top retailers.

Under the agreement, IBM receives a five-year license to certain of Misaud patents. IBM's processor and ASIC products that contain embedded DRAM are licensed under the agreement.