For total dollar revenue over 2011 the only company that can touch Intel’s earnings would be Apple, who actually contributed to Intel’s growth over the past year.  When you talk about percentage growth over last year however ARM actually beat Intel’s 21% growth, although not by much.  Their pre-tax growth approached 50% for the year and they blew away analyst’s predictions both quarterly and yearly.  This probably has to do with the 2.2 billion ARM-powered chips sold globally over the past year, not just the new chips that power your phones and tablets but also chips they’ve been making for a long time which appear in vehicles, appliances and toys.  ARM’s way of doing business is different from Intel who prefer to tie you into an all Intel hardware or no Intel hardware contract, ARM is happy if their chips co-exist with others on a device; they just want a chip in there.  As The Register points out, this flexibility as well as the release of an ARM compatible version of Windows 8 could make the coming years rather interesting.

"ARM, the eponymous designer of the chip architecture, had a stonking 2011 with revenue and profits up as it tightened its hold on both embedded and generic computing.

Revenue for the last quarter of 2011 was up by more than 20 per cent on the previous year, to £137.8m, while profit before tax jumped more than twice that percentage to £69m. For the whole of 2011 the numbers are very similar, revenue hitting £491.8m ($773m) and profit topping £229.7m ($362m), rather better than analysts had predicted."

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