#nvidia arm

In a report by Reuters, Softbank's sale of British semiconductor and software design company Arm to American GPU designer NVIDIA will no longer push through. Instead, Arm will plan for a USD 80 billion IPO. NVIDIA's acquisition of Arm would provide the former a big advantage to compete with rivals, namely Intel and AMD. Reuters said that NVIDIA declined to comment, while Arm and SoftBank are yet to respond. If you're familiar with the 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 that powers the Samsung Wave and Galaxy S including the new Archos Android tablets, then it's going to be easy to imagine what a dual Cortex-A15 running up to 2.5GHz would look like. Samsung also announced a few days ago that they're shipping their new dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 1GHz starting 4th quarter of this year. ARM's dual-core Cortex-A15 MPCore can reach clock speeds of up to 2.5GHz and should be available by 2012. For the meantime, expect a lot of new smartphones and tablet to run the top-of-the-line ARM Cortex-A8 1GHz and possibly new Android smartphones from Samsung running their dual-core Cortex-A9 that's capable of full HD 1080p playback. Read more in our articles including "Softbank's Arm deal with NVIDIA collapses" and "ARM announces 2.5GHz Cortex-A15 MPCore".