ARM sees 16 percent profit increase in Q4 2012, 21 percent increase in royalty payments
Posted in: Today's Chili 
UK-based chipmaker ARM had yet another profitable quarter, announcing that the end of 2012 saw pre-tax profits of around $126 million — an increase of 16 percent since the same period last year. Revenue totaled $262.8 million for Q4 and with a huge proportion of Android and iOS devices containing chip know-how from ARM, it continues to benefit from the smartphone boom. In fact, shipments of chips based on its processors totaled 2.5 billion in Q4 alone, while royalty revenue grew 21 percent year-on-year, thanks to successes with both its Cortex-A and Mali silicon series. ARM chief exec Warren East added that the company is “well positioned” to have a great 2013, too — unless everyone stops buying phones all of a sudden.
Filed under: Misc
Via: Reuters
Source: ARM
ARM’s big.LITTLE is a processor technology that you are going to hear a lot about in 2013 as Samsung, Huawei and others promote their 8-core (octo-core) chips used in smartphones, tablets and possibly Chromebooks. There is no doubt that marketing teams will call those chips “8 cores” – because you know, 8 is better than 4, which is better than 2… But these chips aren’t 8-core in the way that most people think about 8-cores, which means 8 cores that work together on a computing task. Instead, big.LITTLE octo-core chips have two sets of four cores, some big, some small (hence the big.LITTLE name), that take turns to execute a task with the most efficient power envelope. Let’s take a closer look:
