Surprise Industry Fact: ARM's Biggest Customer is Intel
Who would have thought? This piece originally slipped by under our radar, but it is a noteworthy piece of information, especially since we now know at least one specific ARM chip that Intel is manufacturing ARM cores in its fabs.
In 2010, Intel was ARM's most significant resource of licensing revenue, but it has been unclear which products Intel is paying licensing fees for.
According to an article published by EETimes, about 7.0 percent of ARM's 2010 revenue - $631.3 million - came from Intel. That amounts to about $44 million in licensing fees. The source of this information is Nomura Equity Research, which, however, did not disclose where this number came from and which products it relates to. Netronome, which uses Intel as a contract foundry for its NFP-6xxx series Flow Processor, recently stated that the chips will integrated an ARMv6-based ARM11 core. Depending on the success of the chips, it is likely that Intel's payments to ARM will be increasing down the road.
According to Nomura, TSMC contributes 5.7 percent to ARM's revenue base, Samsung 5.7 percent, TI 4.6 percent, and NEC 3.5 percent. Interestingly, there is also AMD on the list (2.5 percent) - ahead of Infineon, Apple, Qualcomm, Fujitsu, and UMC.
Did I miss it, or is there no link to the source? Googling shows it to be six months old and is really a better write-up on the topic: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4234459/ARM-customers
Did I miss it, or is there no link to the source? Googling shows it to be six months old and is really a better write-up on the topic: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4234459/ARM-customers
An ARM micro-controller are at the core of practically every SATA II and SATA III interface. Ethernet controllers also require an ARM micro-controller. Both are things Intel produce, so naturally they have to pay license fees.
No PCs can be made without minimum 2 ARM chips inside, and usually there are many more.
These types of contracts are common when you're talking about well-protected engineering and manufacturing secrets.
Forget reading the article.... Just know....
http://www.netronome.com/pages/flow-processors
Not sure if trolling or....
Tom's: a little bit of fact checking goes a long way--publishing it 5 months after a revision is just embarassing. Please update the article and whatever else you have to do to un-mislead people.