Now Qualcomm also focuses on building the specialized processor chips that go inside wireless phones — 100 million sold to date.
And if you can work out which tech company is building the very best graphics chips, processors and joysticklike gadgets to wire the box to your kid's brain, buy its stock.
"Although at the heart of what we're doing is we're building a processor, we're building our own chip — leading edge process, 16 nanometer — we're actually going to deliver that as a system solution, so we'll deliver PCI express cards and we'll actually put that into a chassis so that you can put clusters of these IPUs all working together to make it easy for people to use.
Samsung could be building a processor for Apple that makes use of NEON.
He says that some companies are trying to build full stacks, but the bulk of research as been concentrated on building quantum processors.
Other evidence that suggests Apple could be working with TSMC to start building A6X processors sooner rather than later include the construction of a massive new chip factory in the U.S., which was revealed by The Oregonian around mid-December.
Although most of the attendees at Mashed were professional British web coders, one trio of hackers arrived from the New York Times, while another team which usually works building custom processors at ARM in Cambridge admitted that they were straying from their usual beat.
Samsung, Texas Instruments and the pack of companies building processors for mobile phones based on ARM's mobile processor designs, meanwhile, are poking into the market for netbook computers.
The company is so laser-focused on the performance and, more recently, the power consumed by its processors that it has been unable to see its way beyond building better processors.
Reduced Energy Microsystems is building asynchronous processors so that simpler operations take less time.
