Comment: ARM must beware of the 'tied-selling' trap

Peter Clarke, EE Times
(02/24/2010 9:42 AM EST)

LONDON — The success of ARM Holdings plc with its series of low-power processing cores, and its relatively small-scale success — so far — with its Mali graphics processing cores puts ARM in a potentially dangerous position.

ARM (Cambridge, England) gives royalty discounts when additional processor cores are integrated on a single chip. In the era of multicore processor architectures this clearly makes sense as it is applied to dual-core and quad-core Cortex-A9s and even heterogeneous aggregations of ARM cores. However, Warren East, CEO of ARM, has said that discounts are also extended when a chip company includes a Mali graphics core alongside an ARM general purpose processor cores. And therein lies the danger.

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