On ARM and Imagination

I was looking at Imagination Technologies’ share price the other day and noticed that it went down, for the first time in almost a year and a half.



I’d been traveling and didn’t get to attend the ARM techno conference in Santa Clara. 

At that conference, someone did a video of a dev board that had a Samsung SoC on it with an ARM9 and a Mali 400 GPU.

Nice, going ARM.

But then some sharp shooters either on Bond or Wall street put two and two together and came to the conclusion that: A – Apple uses Samsung SoC with Imagination Technologies’ GPU in iPhone and in iPad and B – now Imagination must be dead to Samsung.

The flocks of birds, darting and swinging at the slightest breeze or startling, starting selling Imagination shares, and driving down the price (but interestingly not buying up ARM.)

These short-sighted flocks are the same ones who invested in derivatives without doing any homework.

If the flock had looked just a little closer they would have seen that the dev board Samsung was showing might be for a Samsung tablet – might.  



And if it is, it won’t show up for probably a year.

In the meantime, we expect Samsung (and others) will come out with some $99 Shenzhen 7-inch tablets (like are being sold at Wallgreens.)

*Jon Peddie, Jon Peddie Research