Samsung is considering acquiring a small stake in ARM, between 3% and 5%, reports an industry official. The plan is for the remaining shares to be bought by a consortium of fabless semi-conductor companies, adds the insider. Samsung’s goal is to reduce the royalty payments for producing chipsets based on the ARM platform – the Cortex CPU and Mali GPU designs. The Korean giant uses these in its Exynos chipsets. Even if a company skips Cortex in favor of its own CPU design (e.g. the M-series cores), it still needs to pay a royalty for the use of the ARM instruction set. That’s not a...