AMD teams up with ARM, exploits media and graphics capabilties

AMD hasn't been able to compete at the high end of the consumer or business PC markets for a while, but it has a few interesting new tricks that should attract customers. A week after launching its Trinity and Brazos 2.0 platforms at Computex, the company hosted its own Fusion Developers' Summit, where it announced the formation of the Heterogenous System Architecture Foundation. HSA refers to AMD's own X86-based processors working in concert with ARM, whose designs have powered the world's most popular smartphones and tablets over the past few years. The two companies, plus Texas Instruments, Imagination Technologies and MediaTek, will work together to develop open systems and standards that allow developers to create software that can work across various architectures and take advantage of all of them. The move harnesses each company's specializations in graphics, decoding, and other computing, and creates a potentially powerful ecosystem that neither Intel nor Nvidia is a part of. AMD also becomes a licensee of ARM technology and will brings the widely used TrustZone hardware-based security solution to AMD processors in 2013, for use in business-centric applications. The company said that it will not, however, be manufacturing ARM CPUs or SoCs for itself