Arm in arm
Look out for the interview on HEXUS.tv, in which Sonderman details the implications of this and GlobalFoundries progress in the smaller manufacturing processes.
Filmed immediately afterwards was an interview with Warren East, the CEO of UK chip designer ARM. The fates of these two companies could well be intertwined. Key customer acquisition targets for GlobalFoundries will include the many companies that design processors based on ARM licenses and currently outsource their manufacture to foundries like TSMC.
It could well be that TSMC's relatively new partnership with Intel, designed, at least in part, to help the latter compete in the low power processor market where ARM designs currently dominate, will work to GlobalFoundries advantage by encouraging some current TSMC customers to review their options.
Getting back to Istanbul, a quick look at Gigabyte's stand while they were setting up on Monday reveals they're not wasting any time in producing Istanbul motherboards.
