Amazon is negotiating to acquire Texas Instruments’ abandoned ARM business, according to Calcalist, the Israeli business daily written in Hebrew. It says the companies are in advanced talks.
According to the story Amazon wants to be a merchant chip house competing with Qualcomm, Samsung, and Apple, not just for its cheap sold-at-cost Kindle tablets, which will be facing competition soon from Apple’s fabled iPad mini.
Amazon is also understood to be working on its own smartphone.
Calcalist figures it for a multibillion-dollar deal.
Amazon sourced its ARM OMAP chips from TI, which is giving up its tablet and smartphone chip line in a bow to superior competitive forces. It means to focus on industrial and automotive chips instead.
Barnes & Noble also uses TI processors in its Nook e-readers.