ARM Holdings this week posted better-than-expected financial results due to growing adoption of chips based on ARM architecture. In total, ARM partners shipped whopping two billion of microprocessors for various applications with ARM technology inside. The company also indicated that that the embracing of all of its technologies is increasing. For example, it now has ARMv8 64-bit architecture licensees and continues to hope for wide adoption in notebooks.

"ARM’s royalty revenues continued to outperform the overall semiconductor industry as our customers gained market share within existing markets and launched products which are taking ARM technology into new markets," said Warren East, chief executive officer of ARM.

During the second quarter of 2012, around two billion ARM chips shipped into a wide range of applications, up 9% year-on-year compared with industry shipments being down 4%. ARM's processor royalties grew 14% year-on-year compared with a decline in industry revenues of 7%, the company indicated. ARM's average royalty revenue per chip in Q2 2012 was 4.8 cents, up from 4.5 cents one year ago. During the quarter, there were 23 processor licenses signed across key target markets from microcontrollers to mobile computing. Besides, ARM’s momentum in networking continues with an ARMv8 architecture license for intelligent networking applications, and Freescale announcing their first ARM-processor based chips for network infrastructure.

“This quarter we have seen multiple market leaders announce exciting new products including computers and servers from Dell and Microsoft, and embedded applications from Freescale and Toshiba. In addition, ARM and TSMC announced a partnership to optimise next generation ARM processors and physical IP and TSMC's FinFET process technology," added Mr. East.

For the second quarter of 2012 (ended on June 30), ARM earned $213 million in revenues and approximately $102.93 million in profit before tax. It is necessary to note that the lion's share of revenue came as licensing fees for previous-generation products, therefore, the company is still to enjoy increased of its earnings and higher volumes of advanced Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A15 and ARMv8 chips become available on the market.

Going forward, ARM pins a lot of hopes onto such applications as networking, servers and consumer personal computers.

"We are not changing our estimates for an expectation that by about 2015, we expect that we will have a share of the laptop market of maybe 15% to 20%," said chief executive of ARM.

Tags: ARM, Business, Cortex