Fujitsu licenses ARM, points to possible ARM-based tablets

Japanese hardware manufacturer Fujitsu recently announced a signed deal with ARM Holdings, the company behind the increasingly popular ARM architecture found in smartphones and tablets as Cortex CPUs, Nvidia Tegra APUs, TI OMAP system on chips (SoC) and Qualcomm’s speedy Snapdragon. The agreement will “enhance and deepen the companies’ partnership”, ARM Holdings claims.

Fujitsu is not a new player to the ARM architecture, however, as the company has been building ARM-based products for industrial purposes as reported by Ubergizmo. Furthermore, Fujitsu is also selling phones in Japan already.

The new license will allow Fujitsu to incorporate the latest ARM-based designs into consumer tablets and smartphones alike, all the while reducing time to market. For example, Fujitsu will be granted primary access to the recently launched successor to the Cortex-A9 family, the Cortex-A15. This should give the company a noticeable advantage over the competition should it decide to include the processor in upcoming tablets and phones.

The ARM architecture has always been used extensively for mobile devices over the more traditional x86 architecture from Intel, and this trend appears to be continuing with the advent of modern tablets. Microsoft has even demonstrated an alpha-build of Windows running on an ARM-based computer at CES 2011. Thus, it may be unsurprising that Fujitsu is strengthening its ties with ARM Holdings for better access to the technology for its own future products.

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