News ARM announces 44 per cent jump in profits

Sure they're not exactly on the same scale as Intel, but they don't need to be. Intel supplies chips for the traditional desktop and server - ARM are not aiming for the same market. To see such a massive increase in the company's revenue - a company that does not even manufacture any processors themselves - is quite heartening.

I've been a fan of ARM for a long time - a quick multiprocessor/multi-core ARM chip could easily replace the traditional desktop for the vast majority of people. I don't really need a 2.4GHz dual core chip to run some spreadsheets and type up emails/word documents at work, and the average home user doesn't need that power to check their emails and do some web-browsing.

Microsoft needs to start supporting ARM properly - I don't just mean the "Metro and Windows app store only" version of Win8. They need a proper, traditional desktop environment (as in, something that people will be familiar with) that runs on ARM. For the time being, Linux - and a limited set of distros at that - is all we're going to get; that's a severely limiting factor, as there is comparitively very little pre-compiled binary software available for ARM. Not many people are prepared to cross-compile their own source code...