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Re:TI buys National Semiconductor for $6.5B by ck2 on Tuesday April 05, 2011 @03:19AM (#2410045)
Is this good or bad for the future of ARM cpu/chipsets?
Re:TI buys National Semiconductor for $6.5B by reemrevnivek on Tuesday April 05, 2011 @09:15AM (#2410770)
It's irrelevant: National doesn't make many microcontrollers, much less CPUs. They've got a few small, overpriced 8- and 16-bitters (think garage door opener, not smartphone) running proprietary cores, but those are not very popular. (And they've reassured us that they won't discontinue this stuff anytime soon, though I think that it's high time to start looking elsewhere if you depend on National's microcontrollers...)

This does have an impact, though, on the support components which are necessary to build a motherboard - voltage regulators, sensors, diodes, transistors, glue logic, level translators, etc. National and TI used to be competitors in that arena, now they're on the same team.