[citation][nom]Tomtompiper[/nom]ARM has been working away quietly while Intel, AMD and IBM have been hogging all the limelight. Now that the era of powerful small and efficient processors has dawned ARM has the right business model and the right processors, it can move faster than its competitors and has a ten year lead on them in the fastest growing market on the planet. I would expect Nvidia, AMD and Intel to nibble at the edges of the market, but they will be fighting over the scraps falling from ARM's table.[/citation]
ARM is purely a design house that licenses their to manufacturers. They're totally fabless, unlike Intel and IBM. As for Nvidia, they already have an ARM-based chip in Tegra/Tegra II. Tegra and designs by PowerVR are what ARM is up against here with this graphics chip, since those are what you usually get in the way of graphics with ARM-based SoCs.
AMD so far has no real ARM-coupled graphics solution, but they aren't aiming for anything in the space that ARM occupies (low performance but extremely low power, like smartphones, PMPs and tablets). They're just now putting out solutions for netbook-like devices, after years of letting Geode languish. Their real market is servers, and after that desktops/laptops. Intel is the one that's working its way down into ARM's turf, while ARM is now working up to meet Intel at the Atom level.