ARM has announced the availability of a significantly expanded lineup of ARM Processor Optimization Pack (POP) solutions for TSMC 40nm and 28nm process technologies targeting a range of ARM Cortex processors.

ARM said Tuesday that it would set up a joint venture with Gemalto, plus Giesecke & Devrient to develop secure software that could be used for mobile devices.

Brite Semiconductor, Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) and ARM have jointly announced the first tape out of a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore test chip using SMIC's 40nm low leakage process technology.

Windows 8 is stable on the ARM chip platform and will be seeded to developers soon, sources told CNET. Devices may be priced significantly less than their Intel counterparts, too.

ARM hopes for a serious impact on the server market starting in 2014 when its 64-bit processor design reaches the market, CEO Warren East said.

"It's inevitable Intel will get a few smartphone design wins - we regard Intel as a serious competitor," said ARM CEO Warren East in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "Are they ever going to be the leaders in power efficiency? No, of course not. But they have a lot more to offer."

Gold's skepticism arises from the lack of backwards software compatibility on the platform and said the danger is that if the market doesn't quickly take up Windows on ARM, Microsoft will stop spending resources on it, as has been the case with other platforms beforehand.

OMAP 5 will come to the consumer market "maybe in the fourth quarter [of 2012]," said Greg Delagi, senior vice president and general manager of TI's Wireless Business Unit. OMAP 5 differs from OMAP 4 in that it uses a dual-core A15 CPU, the next generation from chip designer ARM.

ARM expects the semiconductor industry to grow by "a few percent" in 2012, but its licensing growth will be slower after an exceptionally strong year in 2011, its senior executive said on Thursday.

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.

ARM has announced the ARM Mali-T658 GPU - the latest member of the Midgard architecture-based GPU family targeting high performance devices such as superphones, tablets and smart-TVs. The Mali-T658 GPU delivers up to ten times the graphics performance of the Mali-400 MP GPU, found in a wide range of today's mainstream consumer products.

Prolific develops leading-edge IC design optimization software tools that significantly reduce development time and improve the performance of cell-based designs.

ARM, which designs the technology at the heart of all the top smartphones and tablets, has dismissed its American rival Intel as a "niche" player in the future of computing.

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.

Strong growth in customer numbers helped UK chipmaker ARM beat analysts' forecasts with its third-quarter results, despite "below seasonal growth in the semiconductor industry."

Intel is disbanding its Digital Home Group, which builds SoC Atom variants for smart TVs and other similar consumer electronics devices. Boxee Box and Google TV are both based on Intel's CE4100 Atom SoC.

The beauty of these system-on-chip architectures is that they can be placed in very tight spaces. This obviously impacts case designs.

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.

"If you get a buyer who is a significant part of the ecosystem, in which they already play a part, it is likely that they would be excluding part of the market and therefore diminishing part of the value of ARM...

HiSilicon Technologies has licensed a range of ARM technology for use across the breadth of its communications chip design activities including: 3G/4G basestations, networking infrastructure and mobile computing applications.

ARM sounded a note of caution about electronic goods sales this Christmas, even as it announced a better-than-expected second quarter in which its technology, already dominant in smartphones and tablets, was licensed for more and more uses.

Up to a million ARM processors are to be linked together to create a massive computer, called SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network architecture) that can simulate the workings of the brain.

ARM has said that within 18 months its Mali GPU will be able to match the power of Sony's Playstation 3 or Microsoft's Xbox 360, but that Moore's Law was not the only way to achieve that.

CEO Paul Otellini called the MeeGo tie-in a mistake, and that the company would have been better-off choosing a different partner.

ARM expects to "compete at a consistently high level" in the mobile device market despite the news that rival Intel has a new process for making chips that could prove to be attractive to makers of tablets, smartphones and other similar devices.