Advanced Micro Devices is cozying up to ARM Holdings and that's led to speculation that AMD is pursuing an ARM architecture license or even plans to acquire the British chip designer outright in an effort to catch up with the growing media tablet market.
Available media tablets such as Apple's iPad and Motorola's Xoom almost exclusively use ARM-based central processors instead of the x86-based chips made by AMD and its larger rival Intel.
AMD has indicated it wants in on the tablet market in recent months. The news that ARM vice president of technology Jem Davies will keynote AMD's upcoming Fusion Developer Summit sparked rumors that AMD could be mulling a stab at the tablet market with an ARM license of its own.
But AMD has no specific plans to add ARM's RISC-based chips to its portfolio, an AMD spokesman told PCMag Friday.
"Specifically, I have no news to tell you about anything like that," said John Taylor, director of client product and software marketing at AMD.
But Taylor seemed to leave the door open for things to change.
"We're looking at all of our options as far as our strategy going forward," he said. "We feel we view the marketplace in a way that's pretty well aligned to the way ARM is looking at the marketplace as far as the future of devices."
Taylor also said that licensing technology and pursuing an outright acquisition—as Tom's Hardware on Friday advised AMD to do with ARM Holdings —are "very different things."
One major AMD competitor, Nvidia, has licensed the ARM architecture and combined ARM-based CPUs with its own GeForce graphics processors in its Tegra line of chips for tablets like the Acer Iconia A500 and for smaller mobile devices.
But Taylor said AMD is "not competing with Tegra in devices right now."
Instead, AMD is betting that its new combined CPU-GPU "accelerated processing units," or APUs, will not just gain the chipmaker share in the notebook market but also start making headway in tablets.
"We're in a handful of Windows-based tablets today and we're marching towards introducing fanless designs for our APUs," Taylor said. "We're still drawing higher application power [than ARM-based chips], but the level of compute—full Windows, HD video on demand, gaming, etc. —nobody can touch that.
"Some of these complaints about Intel-based tablets are that they have Atom cores but just a bare minimum of graphics and that's not good enough."
Intel, the leading x86 chipmaker in the world, is accelerating its technology roadmap for its Atom product line to better position itself for the tablet and smartphone markets.
That may yet happen, but IDC analyst Michael Palma said Intel had "been caught kind of flat-footed by the rise of tablets, even though they've been talking about [mobile Internet devices] for years."
Intel CEO Paul Otellini's recent comments that he'd be "disappointed" if there wasn't an Intel-based smartphone "in 12 months" had many analysts scratching their heads about such a lengthy window of time.
Intel has also said it plans to make a serious push on media tablets before the end of 2011, but that too seems like a company that is perhaps pacing itself too much in a race that's already being won.
But Palma said companies like Intel and AMD, which are selling more data center-targeted x86 server chips as Internet-dependent ARM-based device shipments rise, can afford to take their time.
"The reality is that there's still a long time for this market to develop," he said.