Chip design outfit ARM claims that the market for tablet PCs could grow to as much as 60 nillion unit sales next year.

Speaking to the FT ARM CEO Warren East dismissed that Intel will make any headway into the tablet market Chipzilla has been pushing to bring its ‘Atom’ processor from netbooks, but East said that while Atom may appear in some tablet models next year “Atom designs are just not good enough in terms of power consumption and Intel knows this”.

East said that tablet sales next year could be anywhere from 30m to 60m but probably at the higher end of that range. He admitted that there was still some concern, however, that consumer spending on electronics in the west could weaken over the next few months. But, he said: “You can’t avoid that, it’s like the weather. We’re concerned that it might rain. There are clouds up there. But what we’ve experienced in 2009 was that ARM still outperformed the industry in a down year.”