AMD's fab spinoff, GlobalFoundries, has announced a deal with ARM to make the latter's Cortex A9 parts available on the former's 28nm half-node process. This makes GlobalFoundries the first company to work with ARM on a 28nm A9 implementation, and it's a win for ARM because it makes any GlobalFoundries customers into potential ARM customers.

A bit of background: a system-on-a-chip (SoC) provider who is already using GlobalFoundries to produce its SoCs can more easily mix its own technology with ARM's to produce SoCs based on Cortex A9. This is the same reason that Intel ported Atom to TSMC—so that existing TSMC customers can also mix Atom with their own IP to make Atom-based SoCs. (Of course, what was a shocking move for Intel is standard procedure for ARM, which is a fabless semi company whose total revenues are less than what Intel spends to develop one processor.)

ARM PR, for its part, took this opportunity to once again remind everyone that Adobe Flash 10.1 is now available on its processors. This is a direct slap at the now-inoperable Intel talking point that Atom is better than ARM because only Atom "runs the full Internet." This talking-point was actually still in use at last month's IDF, despite the fact that everyone there knew that it was essentially nonsense.

The most interesting aspect of today's announcement surrounds AMD as a possible Cortex A9 user, because AMD is still GlobalFoundries' main customer. You may recall that AMD had a very exciting line of ARM-based SoCs that contained its DX10-compatible graphics technology that went under the name of Imageon. (AMD/ATI was well ahead of NVIDIA's Tegra here). But this past January, AMD sold the Imageon unit to Qualcomm—a depressing and abrupt exit from a real growth market, all in the name of cutting red ink in the face of the downturn.

Given that AMD was in the ARM business and got out of it just 9 months ago, it seems unlikely that it will jump back in with another ARM-based SoC courtesy of GlobalFoundries. This is too bad, though, because there's a ton of enthusiasm about A9-based "smartbooks," and an A9-based Imageon would've provided a great basis for a high-powered, low-cost, long battery-life Linux portable. But AMD has gotten out of the SoC game just as it's getting interesting.

GlobalFoundries doesn't need AMD to use ARM to make the deal worth doing, though. STMicro has recently signed on with them as a customer, and the new company is also buying Chartered Semiconductor, a large foundry that counts Broadcomm and Qualcomm as customers. Given the scope of GlobalFoundries' ambition and the recent uptick in global semiconductor demand, this ARM announcement seems logical and timely.