According to The Street, “a Samsung Electronics official denied the reports to The Hankyoreh” on Wednesday and “noted that prices are set at the beginning of the year and aren’t changed easily.”

That contradicts the claim that Apple had no choice but to accept the 20 percent price hike because there was no other supplier who could churn out enough iPhone and iPad processors.

But the denial doesn’t necessarily clear things up. The previous story said the price hike had come “recently.” If prices are set at the beginning of the year, perhaps what’s come out in the press is negotiating for 2013 prices? The translation of the Samsung official’s denial wasn’t clear cut.

Whether they raised their prices or not, the status of the relationship between Samsung and Apple is still very complicated. Apple and Samsung’s businesses are deeply intertwined, and since the epic patent trial win by Apple this summer, things have gotten more tense and negotiations between the two partner competitors continue to play out in public.

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Apple reportedly bought 130 million mobile processors from Samsung last year, and 200 million this year. It’s not clear by how much prices were raised.

Price changes on components in and of themselves aren’t necessarily controversial. There could be plenty of reasons Samsung had to charge Apple more. But in the context of the last few months which saw Apple win a verdict of $1 billion against Samsung, it naturally raises some eyebrows: is this some form of payback?

Not necessarily. But it doesn’t fit with Apple’s recent history. Apple’s big advantage in the marketplace has been scale: it’s among the world’s top purchasers of most mobile components due to the sheer number of smartphones and tablets it sells. CEO Tim Cook is known for his skill in managing that scale and how he finds suppliers willing to do Apple’s bidding for the lowest possible price.

In this case, it’s very likely that Apple has no other choice — it’s not clear any other supplier could churn out as many mobile processors as Samsung can or, even if that was possible, if Apple could make the switch so quickly. The original report quotes an unnamed source who says:

“Samsung Electronics recently asked Apple for a significant price raise in (the mobile processor known as) application processor,” the person was quoted as saying in the report. “Apple first disapproved it, but finding no replacement supplier, it accepted the (increase.)”

These two have always had an odd arrangement as partner-competitors. Sure, smartphones and components (displays, processors, memory chips) are totally different divisions at the gigantic corporation that is Samsung. But the trial this summer strained credibility that the two were really “trusted partners” the way many at the two companies described it.

When asked about the company’s relationship with Samsung at Apple’s quarterly earnings call last month, Cook wasn’t quite as effusive as he’s been in years’ past. When asked by an investor about Apple moving orders for iPhone and iPad displays from Samsung to other suppliers, he simply said, “We continue to be a customer of Samsung and continue to have a commercial relationship.” The transcript doesn’t convey the pause Cook put in when he seemed to be searching for the right word to describe their relationship. He didn’t come up with “valued partner” or “enthusiastic customer” anything positive — just “we are a customer of Samsung.”

Perhaps Samsung sees Apple the same way: no more special treatment or special pricing in hopes of keeping the relationship strong. If our costs are raised, we will pass those on to you.

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To get a feel for the chip’s capabilities, as well as where it fits within TI’s product roadmap, I spoke by phone with Mark Granger, who is in charge of the OMAP product platform marketing.  Granger first covered the basics: two ARM Cortex-A9 cores running at up to 1.8 GHz per core, a hardware composition engine with dedicated 2-D graphics core and Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX544 GPU.

I was curious about the timing and strategy of the product, mainly because Texas Intstruments has already announced a successor to the OMAP 4 chip line. In February, TI introduced its OMAP 5, then saying that it too would be sampling in the second half of 2011. There’s no expected overlap, Granger said during our phone call. “Both the OMAP4470 and OMAP 5 chips will sample in the second half of 2011, but products using the 4470 are expected in the first half of 2012, while products using OMAP 5 are slated for the second half of next year,” he told me.

That timeline makes sense for a few reasons. First, the OMAP4470 has the same pin configuration as existing OMAP 4 chips, such as those used in the BlackBerry PlayBook. That means device manufacturers currently using an OMAP 4 can quickly upgrade their hardware with little development cost. Second, while Microsoft hasn’t yet announced when it would have a version of Windows available for ARM processors, it’s widely expected to be some time next year. Whether that happens in the first or second half of 2012, TI is covered by both the new OMAP4470 or the future OMAP 5 chips to power such computers.

Unlike Nvidia’s upcoming Kal-El chip, which uses a dozen GPU cores, the new OMAP4470 has a single GPU core. On paper that may be a huge difference, but the TI chip sounds capable from a graphics perspective. The display subsystem can drive as many as three high-definition displays and up to 2048×1536 resolution, plus it supports stereoscopic 3-D visuals.

In addition, the SGX544 graphics component supports display technologies used by both mobile and desktop environments, such as DirectX, OpenGL ES 2.0, Open VG 1.1, and Open CL 1.1. Granger told me the CPU can handle much of the base user interface visuals, which frees up the GPU for more intensive visual tasks, “balancing out the horsepower” of the chip, according to Granger.

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According to Silicon Hive, its processors utilize a software-based approach to SoC design that make them both less expensive and more adaptable to a range of applications. Additionally, the company touts performance increases over other SoCs designed for consumer applications, as explained on its website:

Silicon Hive is able to take scalability in parallelism far beyond established limits. Silicon Hive’s underlying architecture template and tooling have no limits (other than silicon process technology) on the amount of parallel compute, storage and I/O resources made available in a given processor. The available number of compute, storage and I/O resource can range from one to many. In practice, Silicon Hive processors typically process 4 to 8 times more instructions in parallel than conventional Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processors and 10 to 30 times more parallel SIMD operations than most other processors.

New Venture Partners, Silicon Hive’s lead investor, announced the deal in a press release in which it states, “[t]he Silicon Hive capabilities will aid in the delivery of Intel’s more differentiated Atom-processor based SoCs as multimedia and imaging grow in importance across the mobile smart device segments.” So, Atom won’t likely become the processor of choice for devices in the near term, but it would be a boon if its Silicon Hive integration peaked around the time that usage of mobile devices for consuming video and other applications requiring advanced imaging capabilities also peak. These types of applications are prime targets for parallel processing, which is why Nvidia’s Tegra chip, which includes an ARM Cortex-A9 CPU and Nvidia’s GeForce GPU, is such a hot commodity right now among mobile device makers. GPUs are noted for their ability to handle parallel processing. Intel also signed a cross-licensing deal with Nvidia in January that gives Intel access to some of Nvidia’s GPU intellectual property.

However, we also have been extensively covering the advent of low-power processors to power micro servers, and that space has picked up a lot of steam in the past few months. New ARM-based CPUs will power server processors from both Nvidia and Calxeda, and Intel itself has gotten into the same by building a specialized Atom processor for startup server maker SeaMicro — which is packing 256 dual-core Atom processors into a single box — and Intel even announced its own plans to start selling a 10-watt Atom processor for servers some time next year. Silicon Hive’s SoC technology hasn’t been used for server processors yet, but Intel might look at ways of adapting to that end, because the ARM Cortex-A15 design that underpins the Nvidia and Calxeda processors is itself a quad-core SoC.

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Manufacturing samples of Qualcomm’s MSM8960 are expected in 2011 and are likely to be the company’s first system on a chip (SOC) created with a 28-nanometer process. Aside from reducing power use, Qualcomm’s presentation shows a dual-core processor, a four-fold boost in graphics thanks to a new Adreno 300 GPU, and perhaps most important: integrated support for both 3G and LTE networks. The multi-network support is key because LTE networks are just now beginning to roll out, and some carriers intend to use existing 3G infrastructure as a fallback or supplement for LTE. Data may be on the new network, for example, while voice continues on 3G.

While the new chip sounds breathtaking on paper, consumers shouldn’t hold their breath waiting to buy a smartphone with the MSM8960. The chip samples in 2011 are strictly for device manufacturers to see and use for planning purposes. Qualcomm hasn’t indicated when large-scale production for the new chips will begin, so I’m not expecting to see any devices using the new chips for at least a year. We should hear more about the next-generation processor at the Consumer Electronics Show this coming January, but the only devices we may see would be prototypes to show off the chip capabilities.

Still, Qualcomm’s next Snapdragon appears ready to buck a long-time trend in the mobile world; typically there’s a trade-off between power requirements and performance, but the MSM8960 looks poised to undercut that theory. More importantly, if the chip can deliver on its high-performance promises, it becomes another thorn in the side of Intel and its Atom efforts.

Image credit: Flickr user VOD Cars

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