Broadcom might be getting into netbooks

THE RUMOUR MILL is churning out the story that Broadcom's new deal with ARM is all about a cunning plan to get into making netbooks.

Analysts have been wondering why Broadcom, which is known as a fabless chipmaker, splashed out on a licence for the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor.

The Cortex is pretty much the de facto processor standard for the emerging smartbook and MID category, next to Intel's Atom. So far Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Freescale have signed up to make the chip, but people are wondering why Broadcom got interested.

The Southern California outfit, which already uses ARM designs in various product lines, has been trying to break into the mobile device market. But the Cortex-A9 MPCore processor is a rather different animal.

It can run up to four independently configured cores carrying out multiple tasks in parallel and a single processor claims twice the performance of current smartphone processors.

The four-CPU Cortex-A9 processor can reach 1GHz with a stiff breeze behind it and going downhill.

In a press release, Nambi Seshadri, CTO of Broadcom's mobile platforms and wireless connectivity division, was not saying much either.

He said that the flexibility and scalability of the Cortex-A9 processor enables Broadcom to "optimise development costs by addressing the requirements of wireless applications from a common core platform".

No, we don't know what he means by that either. µ