HEXUS.sharewatch: ARM and NVIDIA are the festive winners

Of our list of shares, the clear winners over the Christmas/New Year period were ARM and NVIDIA, and the two are intimately connected.

The big spike in ARM's shares came on 22 December, after rumours emerged that Microsoft is finally making a version of its full Windows OS - as opposed to mobile or embedded versions - compatible with the ARM instruction set.

At around the same time NVIDIA's shares were also undergoing a surge. The big rumour for NVIDIA had broken a week earlier, when it was alleged that Tegra 2 - it's SoC for mobile devices - would be the default chip for the next generation of Android, which will be optimized for tablets.

There was no immediate jump in its share price at the time, but we think that reinforced a general sense of tablet-related optimism around NVIDIA, which continued until the end of the year.

And the two companies are quite interdependent these days, of course. Tegra 2 runs two ARM Cortex A9 CPU cores alongside the NVIDIA graphics. So any new platforms for ARM mean new platforms for Tegra 2, and ARM directly benefits in the form of royalties from the success of Tegra 2.

Perhaps as a direct consequence of all this, would-be mobile chip rival Intel was the only conspicuous loser over the past two weeks.