Arm Holdings is in talks for its chip technology to be used with Google TV, the software aimed at putting the Internet on television sets everywhere.
“We are talking to Google, but we have nothing to announce right now,” said Tudor Brown, president of Arm, at a technology conference in Taipei on Thursday.
When Google TV software was announced in May, Google said it was made for use on Intel’s Atom processor CE4100, an x86 architecture chip. Arm is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing)-based chip. Software has to be written to run on a specific chip architecture, in this case either x86 or RISC.
Brown said Arm’s latest processors are less expensive and require less power than Intel’s Atom processor. “If Google TV is to be mainstream, it must be built on a lower power system, …on lower cost technology,” he said.
Two companies, Sony and Logitech, both said they would deliver Google TV consoles based on Atom processors this year. Google has said that Google TV is designed to work with any TV operator, but at launch the user experience will be tweaked to work best with DISH network, the U.S. satellite TV service.
Google TV is software based on Google’s Android mobile software and runs the Google Chrome Web browser.