February 2010 Archives

Intel Capital has previously led a $7m investment round in Netherlands-based Silicon Hive, which develops silicon IP for imaging, video processing and communications.

You might expect, therefore, that the semiconductor industry would mirror the broader economy's malaise; this scenario has indeed occurred in many technology and product sectors. The x86 CPU business has bucked the general trend, however, as continued R&D investment and resultant new-IC output demonstrate.

"Although netbooks are small today - maybe 10% of the PC market at most - we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90% of the PC market," said East. "We see those products as an area for a lot of innovation and we want that innovation to be happening around the ARM architecture."