"These are hard puzzles, " says Patrick Jost, a former Treasury official now at London anti-money-laundering consultancy Risc Global.

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Hitachi's SH3-DSP integrated RISC architecture is optimized to allow smart phones and other handheld devices to access information from the Internet.

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It is comprised of smaller revenue generating product lines such as digital light processing (DLP) projectors and reduced-instruction set computing (RISC) microprocessors.

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"Using a hybrid design will allow new applications for consumer devices that previously were unavailable, because it would have required a much higher-performance RISC processor, " Pelavin said.

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Why on the list: arm is the main designer of RISC (reduced instruction set computing) chips used in such battery-powered information appliances as handlheld PCs and mobile phones.

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Joel Birnbaum was the head of HP Labs at the time and he knew that RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing)architecture was the future and not CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing).

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Traditional RISC processors can handle digital signal processing tasks, but the additional work sucks up valuable processing power that could be used elsewhere, said David Pelavin, product marketing manager for Hitachi's SuperH product family.

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Low costs are a big reason why Intel and AMD have survived, while companies known for data-center processors built around so-called RISC designs such as DEC and Sun have been swallowed up by larger companies.

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Arya says he now sees server chip sales growing 8% a year through 2014, up from his previous forecast of 5% growth, driven by demands created by consumer cloud applications, new opportunities in adjacent storage and networking and gains gains over legacy RISC vendors.

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