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ARM still raking it in, and not just in phones

1.5bn devices to taunt Intel with

ARM has had a good quarter, powering 900 million mobile phones and 600 million other devices sold in the last three months as it expands beyond the pocket and into the world.

Revenues are increasing at a similar rate as ARM's Q3 results show, though this quarter's royalties are based on the last quarter's shipments.

Total revenue was £100.4m up 34 per cent. That revenue lead to a pre-tax profit of £19.6m, on an IFRS basis, more than £10m more than the same period in 2009. "Normalised" profit before tax was up 60 per cent to £38.8m.

Royalties only make up just over half of ARM's income, the rest comes from licences and development kits. Cambridge-based ARM employs around 2,000 people but doesn't actually make anything, it only licenses the designs. But those designs are turning up all over the place, in toys, TVs, cameras and cars, and ARM is looking at a future where everything we don't immediately identify as a "computer" has an ARM-based chip in its heart.

Not that ARM is adverse to making inroads into traditional computing too, and has another licensee for its graphical engine, Mali. Companies looking at Android-based slates will be turning to ARM, though Intel is working hard to capture a slice of that pie.

The aging ARM-7 is still the most popular design, making up almost half of ARMs shipped in the last three months, but the company's new Cortex design is gaining new fans; it now makes up almost 10 per cent of total. ®

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