Warren East, chief executive of ARM, said the market for tablet PCs could grow to as much as 60m unit sales in 2011 as he brushed aside concerns that Intel would pose a major competitive threat to the UK chip company in the fast-growing market.

AMD said it has joined open source MeeGo project, led by rival Intel and Nokia.

New suggested pricing for the Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA SSD is now US$199 for an 80GB drive. Users can double the storage capacity with a 160GB X25-M drive for US$415. The company has also added a new 120GB version of the Intel X25-M for US$249.

"The company has a small foundry business, which operates under the radar and is 'always looking' for customers," according to one source. "The company has been doing this for sometime, but not saying anything about it or at least not publicizing it."

Chipmaker Qualcomm wants to expand in Europe via both organic and acquisition-fueled growth, its top man in the region told a German daily in an interview published on Wednesday.

MeeGo 1.1 was released on Monday. This is the official call to device makers and developers to build us a new class of Linux-based Intel Atom and ARMv7 devices. Version 1.1 includes a user interface for smartphones and for netbooks but not for tablets. This didn't stop yet another round of rumors over a Nokia MeeGo tablet.

While Intel is almost certain to do other foundry deals like the one announced today, we don't see the chipmaker actually pursuing a real foundry model. Rather, Achronix and deals like it will enable Intel to develop new markets with less downside risk, and will ultimately grow the company's IDM business through acquisitions.

Intel, Toshiba and Samsung Electronics will join hands to develop technologies that could more than halve semiconductor line widths to nearly 10 nanometers by 2016, the Nikkei daily reported.

Achronix Semiconductor has announced strategic access to Intel's 22nm process technology, and plans to develop the most advanced FPGAs.

Intel has announced the opening of a massive US$1 billion chip testing and assembly facility in Vietnam. The factory has a total area of 46,000 square meters.

European chipmaker STMicroelectronics has reported higher-than-expected net profits for the third quarter, and said sales would expand in the final three months of the year. STM's results follow recent upbeat earnings reports from Intel and ASML.

The US$2.5 billion chip factory is producing chips on 12-inch silicon wafers, mainly chipsets to be used in desktop computers, laptops and servers. The factory is already fully operational.

Don't underestimate Intel's ability to retool and come back strong. In two years, earnings could top US$3 per share.

"With the Embedded Initiative, Altera is enabling designers in markets such as automotive, industrial, military and wireless to easily leverage a rich ecosystem of processor, OS and IP support all through a single design flow, and to reduce overall system cost..."

One analyst says yes, saying that Micron is going it alone in NAND and without Intel. Intel is not commenting, saying the analyst is only speculating without hard data.

Intel on Thursday said Nokia smartphones based on the Linux-based MeeGo OS under joint development by Intel and Nokia won't appear until 2011.

Intel is apparently working on a tool that will allow developers to transfer iPhone applications to mobile devices that use Intel processors.