There was mixed news from Samsung today with profits for the second quarter hitting a four-year low, and talk of the company being ripe for a takeover.

Yet Datamonitor reported that the company has overtaken Motorola as the world's second largest mobile phone vendor. And intriguingly our sister site The Inquirer reports a rumour that Samsung, far from being taken over, is thinking of buying US chip giant AMD.

Even the Inquirer suggests that the story be taken with a pinch of salt but the very idea could start to ring alarm bells in the US. Samsung's semiconductor sales may be down 4 percent but it remains one of the world's leading semiconductor vendors.

Taiwan's brave Via is the only non-US company offering processors using the overwhelming dominant x86 architecture, as used in PCs. If giant Samsung got in on the act via AMD it could present a formidable challenge to Intel, and shift computing's centre of gravity even further eastwards.