Hossein Yassaie has accused ARM Holdings of exploiting its monopoly for chip designs that power the world's electronic devices.

What is interesting is that both companies are British and both seem to be headed on a collision course.

Imagination moved into ARM's heartland of producing central processing units (CPUs) for devices such as smartphones when it bought MIPS, of the United States, two years ago. It is better known for its PowerVR mobile graphics processors which are under the bonnet of the iPhones and MIPSembedded microprocessors.

But Hossein playing the monopoly card appears to be setting his company up as the little guy trying to take on a bigger rival.

Imagination Technologies announced the Warrior architecture in 2013 and was expected to push MIPS' reach from embedded devices like routers and into smartphones and tablets. Nothing happened and Yassaie thinks it will take a big MIPS design win to get his outfit's foot in the door.

He said that he had to keep such releases to himself because everytime Imagination makes an announcement ARM tends to focus on it.

Hossein has stated before that that ARM has managed to get where it is because it ran a monopoly but with MIPS it has that.

MIPS is getting traction, particularly from the likes of Google supporting 64-bit MIPS chips in Android L but it still has a long way to go.

ARM dominates the mobile SOC market, and Intel is fast becoming the second player in that market with its x86 designs like its Core M and Cherry Trail Atom. If anything Intel has more monopoly experience than ARM meaning that Imagination has to tackle an actual monopoly and someone who is used to establishing one.

What it will have to do is come up with a decent pricing strategy to kill off the rivals once and for all.