What’s the secret sauce in the silicon? The chips will use a 22 nanometer process combined with Intel’s Tri-Gate transistors. The Tri-Gate technology is already used in Intel chips for laptops and desktops, but Silvermont will be the first to use it in mobile devices such as tablets.

AnandTech has a superbly detailed analysis of the new chip, which, according to Intel’s official press release, offers these benefits:

• A new out-of-order execution engine enables best-in-class, single-threaded performance.
  
• A new multi-core and system fabric architecture scalable up to eight cores and enabling greater performance for higher bandwidth, lower latency and more efficient out-of-order support for a more balanced and responsive system.
• New IA instructions and technologies bringing enhanced performance, virtualization and security management capabilities to support a wide range of products. These instructions build on Intel’s existing support for 64-bit and the breadth of the IA software installed base.
• Enhanced power management capabilities including a new intelligent burst technology, low-power C states and a wider dynamic range of operation taking advantage of Intel’s 3-D transistors. Intel Burst Technology 2.0 support for single- and multi-core offers great responsiveness scaled for power efficiency.

I expect we’ll first see Silvermont power a new generation of Windows 8 tablets around the holidays. The current Intel Atom slates running Windows 8 offer the same benefits and experiences of a similarly priced Windows RT slate with an ARM chip. The added benefit is that the tablets with Intel inside run the full Windows 8 software and provide a complete Desktop mode experience.

The downside is that the chips aren’t powerful enough to provided a superb Windows 8 experience; for that, buyers opt for Intel Core i5 chips and give up battery life in the process. If Intel’s claims of Silvermont are correct, however, a low-priced Windows 8 tablet of the future could offer a big performance boost when needed or provide battery savings if a user prefers it.

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This week Broadcom unveiled its first LTE chipset for mobile devices, but it wasn’t just any LTE chip, it was an LTE-Advanced chip. Sprint and T-Mobile were late to the LTE party, but that’s okay. They aren’t building any old LTE networks. They’re building LTE-Advanced networks.

Everywhere you look, some infrastructure vendor is bragging about its LTE-Advanced base station or some carrier is talking up its LTE-Advanced-capable network. With these claims, it’s hard to imagine that just two years ago plain-Jane LTE was on the cutting edge of mobile technology.

It’s all hogwash.

There are no true LTE-Advanced networks, chips or devices in the market today and there won’t be for many years. The mobile industry is playing an old game: technology inflation.

You may remember that a few years back T-Mobile and AT&T magically transformed their HSPA networks from 3G systems into 4G systems by waving their marketing wands. That technology inflation, however, began years began years before when Sprint first attached the 4G moniker to its WiMAX networks.

Even today, mobile technology purists would argue the world has yet to see its first 4G network, since no carrier system yet meets the original 4G guidelines established by the International Telecommunication Union. Instead of condemning the industry’s fast-and-loose play with the term, the ITU simply caved, retroactively defining 4G as pretty much anything the carriers wanted it to be. 4G has always been an iffy term, but after the ITU dropped the ball it became a meaningless one.

Now the same thing is happening with LTE. In an effort to seem more progressive than their competitors, carriers, infrastructure vendors and chipset makers are finding loopholes in the technical standards to elevate their LTE technologies to the rarified status of LTE-Advanced. Basically, the industry is carrying around a Cadillac keychain but it’s really driving a Buick.

For a more detailed explanation of what LTE-Advanced actually is, you can check out these posts from Stacey Higginbotham and me about the technology’s nuts and bolts (If you’re a GigaOM Pro subscriber there’s also this more in-depth piece). Here’s the general twist: LTE is an iterative technology much like 3G HSPA before it. Just as the industry started out with slower UMTS networks and migrated to faster HSPA and HSPA+ systems, LTE will go through the same evolution process over the next decade or so.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ conception of a heterogeneous network

With each new step on that evolutionary path, downlink and uplink speeds will get faster and more resilient, latency levels will drop and overall network capacity will balloon. At some point we’ll follow that path into a set of technologies and techniques that the mobile standards bodies have defined as LTE-Advanced.

We’ll start seeing big changes in how cellular networks and devices are designed. Infrastructure and handset makers will start bolting multiple pairs of antennas onto their towers and devices. Carriers will be able to bond disparate bands of spectrum together to create super-connections. Small cells and Wi-Fi access points will merge into the fabric of our big umbrella cellular grids creating the heterogeneous network. But we’re nowhere near that point today.

The devil is in the technical specs

It’s important to note that LTE-Advanced isn’t a monolithic technology, it’s really a collection of technologies. You can think of LTE-Advanced as a menu, from which carriers will order from depending on their needs. Some will order up the improved air interfaces, while others will munch on multiple antenna or advanced interference mitigation techniques — many operators will do all of the above.

One operator’s LTE-Advanced is going to look very different from another operator’s LTE-Advanced, but there are some minimum guidelines. One of those guidelines is the amount of capacity the network will support over a single 20 MHz swathe, or “carrier,” of spectrum. According to the standards group that defines these things — the 3GPP — at the very least an LTE-Advanced carrier should deliver more than 300 Mbps of downlink capacity or more than 50 Mbps of uplink capacity.

I’m going to pick on Broadcom for a minute, only because it happens to be the most recent offender. In its materials, Broadcom clearly states its super-chip supports 150 Mbps on the downlink and 50 Mbps on the uplink. Impressive, yes, but it’s not LTE-Advanced. What Broadcom has built is known in industry parlance as an LTE user equipment category 4 chip. LTE-Advanced doesn’t start until category 6. This is fairly technical, but take a look at this chart of user equipment categories compiled by Wikipedia editors (A quick reference guide: Release 8 is LTE and Release 10 is LTE-Advanced):

Broadcom is only halfway to even the minimum definition of LTE-Advanced’s speed specs of 300 Mbps. The same goes for Qualcomm and any other LTE chip vendor. In fact, today’s networks are right smack in the middle of the regular LTE standard (maxing out at 100-150 Mbps on the downlink), and they’re probably going to remain that way for some time.

So how is everyone getting away with calling their products LTE-Advanced? Why, through marketing of course. They’ve latched onto a single spec in the LTE-Advanced standards, a technique called carrier aggregation. Carrier aggregation is the super-connection technology I mentioned earlier, and in truth it’s older than the hills. T-Mobile and many other global carriers already use it in their networks to support their 42 Mbps services.

By boasting technical support for carrier aggregation on LTE networks, marketers have made the huge leap to LTE-Advanced, which is ridiculously misleading. It’s the equivalent of ordering a Coke and then claiming you’ve indulged in a full meal.

We’re going to get to LTE-Advanced eventually, and those networks will be truly awesome. But the industry isn’t doing itself any favors by promising us technology it can never deliver. It’s 4G’s overhype all over again, and it needs to stop.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user B & T Media Group Inc.

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We’ve been hearing little snippets about Apple and TSMC for a while. In October, chip analysts in Asia said Apple was moving to TSMC. That followed earlier reports that Apple had made overtures to TSMC for exclusive access to a particular product line (typical Apple m.o.) in exchange for a massive investment from Cupertino.

If Apple does switch away from, or even lessen its reliance on Samsung, it’s pretty unfortunate timing for the Korean chipmaker, which recently made massive investments of its own in its Austin, Texas-based chip manufacturing plant, believed to be for Apple’s A6 line. Obviously Samsung and Apple are on pretty strained terms these days in the aftermath of the $1 billion patent verdict and ongoing appeals process in U.S. federal court. As a result, the companies have eased back on some of their partnerships, such as with the displays for iPhones and iPads. So a change in the chipmaking relationship wouldn’t come as a huge shock; plus, as with the display side of Samsung’s house, Samsung already has a major potential buyer of smartphone and tablet chips built in Austin: itself.

For Apple, there’s the question about what a switch away from Samsung and its Austin-based production lines would mean for Apple’s role as an American job creator: CEO Tim Cook has been very quick to point out lately that “the engine for the iPhone and iPad is made in the U.S.” and not overseas. Right now, TSMC does not have the capacity to build Apple’s latest chips in the U.S.

But that could change. Rumors about a company taking bids for a “Project Azalea,” said to be a plan to set up a new chipmaking factory in the U.S. These have floated around for the last month, with reports tying it to places like upstate New York or Oregon. It could be part of a deal with Apple; that TSMC get a U.S. production foothold in order to land Apple’s likely extremely lucrative mobile processor contract.

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“Selling finished goods with good pricing is an old strategy.”

Korea Times has inside word that LG will show off its own ARM-based chip at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show. The first such chip is anticipated for web-based television sets and future chips could be used for LG smartphones and tablets. LG reportedly has 550 engineers working chip designs for mobile devices. Engadget notes that TSMC is reportedly making the chips for LG; good for the chip-maker, which could also make Apple’s mobile chips soon.

LG has long been a licensee of ARM chips and last year re-affirmed its use of such silicon with licenses for the latest ARM designs. Of particular note is a license for the Cortex-A15 design, which is just now rolling out: The next generation system-on-a-chip is used by Samsung for its $249 Chromebook.

Why design chips and have someone else build them? It’s too much of an investment to build your own chip fabrication plant for starters. And by customizing a base ARM design, companies can create silicon that’s optimized for specific product features. Apple and Samsung both do this today and even HTC has gotten a little “chippy,” designing its ImageSense digital processing solution for its smartphone cameras.

While these custom chips are kept to in-house products for Apple and HTC, Samsung is generating revenue through sales of its chips; something that LG may smartly be considering in the future.

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Both Samsung and Apple have been looking to improve their chip teams. What Mergard is known for — he was one of the people behind AMD’s Brazos chip for “low-end portable computers” — seems well suited to Apple’s focus on low-power chips for mobile devices.

Apple buys a heck of a lot of silicon every year — by some accounts the company is the largest buyer in the world. A lot of what it buys — mobile chips for the iPhone and iPad — has historically been from Samsung, which has played the role of crucial supplier partner and competitor to Apple. A high-profile hire of someone like Mergard directly from a competitor no doubt increases that tension. It’s not quite as awkward as convincing a jury that your valued partner owes you $1 billion for patent infringement, but it’s still another sign that Apple isn’t treading lightly when it comes to competing with Samsung.

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For perspective, most of the powerful mobile devices of today use chips build on ARM’s Cortex-A9 architecture; A-15 is the next step as mobile chips gain more capabilities, shrink in size, and use less power. Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and others are all using A9, but that’s sure to change in the near future.  Here’s a video overview of the A-15 chip’s capabilities on a development product.

What’s inside the small silicon?

So what’s so special about Samsung’s Exynos 5? The chip has two processing cores, each capable of running at 1.7 GHz clock speeds. It also is produced using 32 nanometer HKMG (High-K Metal Gate) technology, which helps make the chips smaller without leaking energy. Samsung says the new chip uses 30 percent less power than the current version, which is built with a 45 nanometer process, while boosting performance 27 percent, for example.

Other improvements? Support for stereoscopic 3D visuals and display resolutions up to WQXGA or 2560×1600; higher than that of both the current iPad and my 27-inch iMac, which is 2560 x 1440. Helping to save power is panel self refresh (PSR) technology, which doesn’t send visuals to a display unless the image is actually changing or in motion. Display Port is available for external monitors from small screen to large and much like today’s traditional computers, the Exynos 5 can take advantage of USB 3.0 and SATA interfaces.

What does this mean for future phones, tablets and computers?

The future envisioned in 2010 is coming soon, thanks to the Exynos 5 and other Cortex-A15 chips in the works from Qualcomm, Nvidia and others. Surely apps that are optimized for the new chips will be snappier. And at a lower level, even the mobile operating system should be react faster and provide a near-real-time experience: Google’s “Project Butter” helps Android 4.1 run faster on today’s chips, but future versions of Android are sure to take advantage of improved chip performance. Of course, platform makers and app developers must re-tool their software to work with multiple cores and new chip capabilities.

In terms of power consumption, displays and radios still take up the lion’s share of energy, but a more efficient A-15 chip should help a little in the battery life department. Don’t expect a cutting edge smartphone to run for twice as long as today, of course. However, you may get more “done” on a single charge: Even if the device run-time is the same or marginally better, activities will be faster.

As device owners watch (and create) more digital content and turn to video chat in lieu of voice calling, improved video capability will become essential for those who make smartphones and tablets. Samsung is integrating the new ARM Mali 604 graphics into the Exynos 5 to provide the high-resolution support for these activities, which also add support for DirectX 11, indicating that this chip could be used for Windows 8 computers. Even if not, expect advanced 2D and 3D mobile gaming as developers can use graphic engine software once reserved for traditional computers.

If you’re impressed by today’s devices, just wait for the next ones

Since this is a whole new chip architecture, the benefits should be much more noticeable than the incremental chip improvements we’ve seen with the current generation of chips. Adding more processor or graphics cores in today’s chips has surely helped bring more capable devices; Nvidia’s Tegra 3, for example, greatly improves gaming, but does so with a brute force approach: More cores.

By reducing chip size, boosting performance and lowering energy consumption, however, devices that launch as soon as late 2012 and into 2013 will show a big step up in capabilities. Essentially, the mobile device of tomorrow will edge closer to the computers of today. Will people trade in their computers for a smartphone or tablet using an Exynos 5, or other comparable chip. Probably not in large numbers, but more will make the move thanks to increased capabilities combined with portability.

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Tesla’s line of Model S cars

For the last five years we’ve become accustomed to seeing the hottest tech hit our mobile phones, but that may be about to change. Sure, phones will continue to get smarter, and perhaps innovations rivaling capacitive touch or natural language personal assistants will still hit the mainstream on handsets, but our vehicles have a brighter future. The chip industry is betting on automotive in a big way: Firms are developing more and more speciality silicon for cars.

Nvidia, Texas Instruments and others are building special applications processors to run the consoles and dashboards of today’s in-vehicle entertainment and navigation systems, while smaller firms such as Freescale and Spansion are building specialty chips for handling co-processing or communications. Overall in the last three years the cost of chips inside a new car has increased from $299 to $355 per vehicle, according to IHS iSuppli. However, those numbers are skewed by the huge numbers of new cars with less silicon inside hitting highways in highly populated countries such as China and India.

When it comes to Western Europe and the U.S., the value of silicon and the new stuff coming online is far more expensive — and advanced says Egil Juliussen, principal analyst infotainment and ADAS at IHS iSuppli. Juliussen estimates that in the next decade we’ll see driverless cars, so to get there a lot will have to happen for the on board silicon and sensor networks.

There are several reasons that the car may be the new font of innovation for mobile applications. Automobiles are high-priced goods so they can absorb a few high-priced chips, and they have batteries that can power more silicon without being forced to shut down after lunch. This is a trend that has been building up for a while, but I think in the next year or two we’re going to see cars with services that redefine technology, much like the iPhone redefined touch screens or the Xbox 360 redefined video game consoles that are now full-featured entertainment machines.

A battle for the brains inside the car.

The automotive console on my 2006 Acura TSX is like a dumb toaster compared to the consoles of today’s new vehicles. But with all of this built in connectivity and navigation systems, cars need a smarter application processor to run everything and Texas Instruments and Nvidia both hope to provide it.

Nvidia scored a spot running the controls of the latest Tesla, while Texas Instruments is working with in-vehicle infotainment providers like Harmon to place its OMAP processors inside cars. Both firms have of applications processors built for automotive use that are related to their smartphone application processors, but which offer more performance. For example, a quad-core chip is better suited for a car than a phone where all the cores can process and consume power thanks to a huge battery.

Plus, as cars go driverless we’ll see a need for greater processing capabilities because they will have to track and model various possible collision scenarios based on the information sent from vehicles around them. Those cars will also have to communicate with the automotive components like brakes and tires as well as require more advanced communications chips for sharing info with other cars. They’ll also have more sensors on the vehicle.

Infotainment and connectivity drive today’s chips.

At the high end chipmakers are focused on entertainment and connectivity. As this chart below from IHS iSuppli shows, the amount of revenue derived from putting better navigation and Bluetooth into cars is steadily rising. And while the jury is still out on how cars will connect without incurring huge data bills and straining network capacity, it’s clearly a platform of interest to carriers.

What’s more interesting than the run of the mill infotainment and connectivity chips are the emergence of specialty processors such as a speech recognition chip from Spansion slated to come out in 2013. This co-processor will work with Nuance’s speech recognition libraries and contain databases of sounds on the chip so more of the processing occurs on the device as opposed to getting sent to a server somewhere.

The result is a faster response and more offline functionality. Sending less information to the cloud benefits the owner in the form of lowered data costs, but it also makes sense for someone who might be verbally requesting directions while driving at 60 miles per hour. Waiting for your spoken command to take a round trip on a 4G or 3G network might leave you a few hundred yards past your destination.

Another element of connected cars worth watching is how electric cars will connect with the smart grid and adapt to the changing electricity demand or how they interact with other cars to relay traffic information back to drivers and public safety officials.

So as Apple and others attempt a coup on the entertainment side, building a platform and walled garden for the apps, navigation and driver interface, under the surface are a host of other opportunities for innovation and chip vendors that want to make cars smarter and more responsive.

What will that mean for users? The average American holds onto a car for more than 10 years, according to Juliussen. So will new cars soon have a shorter useful life before their hardware malfunctions or just can’t support the latest software? I’m not sure I’m eager to see the future of mobility if it means I have to buy a new car every five years or less.

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New chips, sensors and potent graphics processors for more immersive gaming are likely on tap as software applications follow the hardware advances. Symphony Teleca gathered up various data points and technologies in this infographic that helps explain what features to expect. Now that I think about it, many of these are part of Samsung’s new Galaxy S III, which debuted today. Talk about good timing!

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The chips that power today’s smartphones and tablets are expanding to robots as Texas Instruments and iRobot announced a new partnership on Monday. TI’s OMAP platform will be used by iRobot — maker of the Roomba and Scooba service robots — to help develop new robotic technologies.

The partnership is a fitting match. Between its home and government service robots, iRobot has sold more than 7.5 million units, helping to move the robotics market forward. Clearly, it’s a leader in this space. And Texas Instruments is no slouch in the chip department. The company’s OMAP platform powers a number of currently popular mobile devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Motorola’s Droid Razr and the Amazon Kindle Fire.

So why does iRobot need a mobile platform like the OMAP from TI? It’s all about the sensors and chip capabilities. Here’s what TI says, via email, that the OMAP platform will bring to the table:

• Targeted accelerators for multimedia, graphics, imaging and display
• High-performance, dual-external memory interfaces with short path (POP memory)
• Wide bus architecture (direct memory access for processors, accelerators, peripherals)
• Hardware and software support for the most advanced power management techniques
• Multiple power and voltage domains for advanced partitioning
• Unmatched imaging features, built from TI’s years of experience in digital still-camera deployments: fastest camera interface on the market, and dedicated software libraries

But this shouldn’t be surprising if you’ve been following the mobile device market. I called this trend of smartphone guts powering robots in a detailed report back in August of 2010 (subscription required), saying:

Back in 2004, we added an R2D2 Interactive Astromech droid to our family and the li’l fella has provided hours of fun: He dances, plays hide-and-seek and of course plays back memorable sound bites from the Star Wars franchise movies.

So robots in the home aren’t necessarily a new concept, but the ones I envision in a not-too-distant future will leverage various technologies of the smartphone, thanks to advances in chips, various sound and sight sensors, wireless broadband and software.

I also pointed out several examples of leveraging smartphone technology to make smarter robots: Faster chips for better “brains”; integrated connectivity for advanced services and a way to tap vast information stores; and sensor support adding “senses” such as eyesight, hearing and touch to the next generation of robots.

While I don’t know specifically what new products will come from the iRobot and TI partnership, it’s a safe bet that the robots of tomorrow will be smarter, more autonomous and far more interactive than the carpet cleaner devices of today. And you can thank the maturing smartphone, and the chips that power it, for that.

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I wouldn’t call this a new phenomenon: There have been remote access solutions on mobile devices for several years. Think of Citrix’s GoToMyPC  or LogMeIn’s  Ignition. These and similar services allow you to use a mobile devices to interact with the desktop of a Windows PC at home, so you could work on a Word document from an Android tablet, for example.

But virtualization is maturing, as are the mobile chips that power smartphones and tablets. This week at CES, I played a graphic-intensive PC game with stunning visuals and fast action on an Android tablet. But the game itself was actually running on a Windows desktop. Using remote access software from Splashtop on the Asus Transformer Prime tablet, you couldn’t tell. See for yourself in the video demo I captured showing the zero-lag.

Connecting a tablet or phone to remotely use your own computer is just one part of the virtualization story. OnLive has a virtualization service that lets you connect a Windows machine in the cloud. That’s not your PC, but a “PC running on the web,” so to speak. I’ve done this myself with EC2 on Amazon’s Web Services and it only cost me a few dollars a month to run an instance of Windows on a PC I can use, but don’t own: Far cheaper than buying, maintaining and powering a physical computer.

Between this new cloud streaming of computer applications and improved remote access apps, there’s less incentive to buy a new computer. Instead, you can either get more mileage out of an old computer or “rent” one that’s available in the cloud. And either of these can now be accessed by a tablet or smartphone that’s far cheaper than a new computer.

I’m not suggesting the PC industry is dead, but it is bleeding: Sales have started stagnating, and last year smartphones outsold computers, a trend that’s likely to continue, if not accelerate.

In this light, it makes sense that Intel is trying to push some smartphone activities to its new Ultrabooks. As PCs go from physical to virtual over time, consumers will have less reason to buy Intel-powered laptops and desktops, provided they have the connectivity needed to remotely access a PC from a tablet or handset.

Image credit: OnLive

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