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ARM turned in a sparkling first quarter. “We’re very pleased really,” Warren East, ARM’s CEO told Electronics Weekly, “we came into 2009 with everyone expecting a difficult year, and it has been a difficult year, but these are good solid numbers.”
ARM sold 17 new processor licenses in the quarter, and 12 new physical IP licences, six of which were for advanced IP (i.e. 55nm and better).
Revenue, in sterling, for Q1 2009 was 18% above the revenue for Q1 2008, profit for the quarter was up 12% on the profit for Q1 208, £13.5m cash was generated in the quarter and the operating margin was 29.5%.
So is ARM more optimistic than it was in February when it said it expected a flat 2009?
“No we’re sticking to our opinion,” replied East, “frankly at this stage it would be foolhardy to be optimistic. People are feeling a bit better now they’re seeing the end of the de-stocking, but they’re still uncertain over what end demand will be. The very short term visibility is a lot better; the medium term visibility is uncertain.”
The first ARM core to be made on a 32nm process has been manufactured. ARM had an silicon-on-insulator (SOI) version of the Cortex processor made on a 32nm process using ARM’s 32nm physical IP.
“It’s part of our development for 32nm”, said East, “it’s part of an exercise to show that the IP is real enough to build a real product.”
The 32nm chip contains a Cortex processor with some test structures built around the core.
Asked if he was still expecting about ten netbooks to be built using ARM cores this year, East replied: “Something of that order.”
Asked if Linux could do as good a job in a netbook as Microsoft XP, East replied: “Today the Linux world is not as good as Microsoft from the point of view of the user, but it’s getting rapidly better."
"So it will get to be as good as Microsoft and, when that happens, the genie will be out of the bottle. Because Linux is much more cost-effective than Microsoft, people will ask: ‘Why do we use Microsoft?’," said East.
ARM is saying that the new ARM processors, Cortex A8 and the four core Cortex A9, which will be used in the netbooks coming out this year, will be able to deliver a “desktop-class user experience” while using ten times less power than Intel’s Atom.
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