Rewording of Engadget's rewording of The Next Web's translation of<p><a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.calcalist.co.il%2Finternet%2Farticles%2F0%2C7340%2CL-3584838%2C00.html" rel="nofollow">http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...</a>
This post's title is inaccurate and needs fixing. The article's title is: "Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says".<p>It's an external report which is claiming that the two companies are in talks. It's not a press release from Amazon or TI saying they're doing it.<p>[BTW: what is flagging meant to be used for? Why is there no documentation on these features?]
This is awesome. I'll have a cheaper ARM-based EC2 host please.<p>Has anyone considered that this could also be for ARM-based servers instead of just Kindles? :-)
Considering how many Kindles Amazon sells at break even or at cost to them, this would indeed be a good business for them even if they kept all of TI's output to themselves. SoC has got to be an insignificant part of the cost with margins etc.
There are enough companies making ARM processors that I'm not worried about the loss of competition; Barnes & Noble could easily switch to NVidia or Qualcomm or Samsung or...
This would be a good move for Amazon. Look at the biggest phone/tablet sellers right now - both Samsung and Apple design their own chips and exercise a great deal of control on the manufacturing as well. At a certain scale, there is a big benefit to making your own hardware. If nothing else, it lets you optimize for your own requirements instead of for the requirements of other customers.