Intel’s incoming CEO, Brian Krzanich.

Krzanich, who has held roles at Intel since 1982, becomes the sixth CEO for the chip giant. But the real question is if he can help steer the company through an increasingly competitive semiconductor market as changes in the mobile arena erode the demand for Intel’s PC chips. There are also changes in the data center that aren’t hurting Intel yet, but will introduce more competition. The board seems to think he’s capable. From the release:

“Brian is a strong leader with a passion for technology and deep understanding of the business,” said Andy Bryant, chairman of Intel. “His track record of execution and strategic leadership, combined with his open-minded approach to problem solving has earned him the respect of employees, customers and partners worldwide. He has the right combination of knowledge, depth and experience to lead the company during this period of rapid technology and industry change.”

Intel’s incoming president, Renee James.

Krzanich acknowledged the changing industry in part in his canned quote in the release, referring to “ultra-mobility,” as the next era for Intel.

In a symbol of its understanding of the importance of software, the Intel board also elected Renee James as president of Intel. She also assumes her new role on May 16. James had a leadership role in Intel’s R&D division and was the chair of its McAfee, Wind River and Havok software operations, which means she probably has a lot of the insights into the threats and opportunities Intel faces, as well as understands what the chip giant can bring to bear on the market.

James also currently serves on the board of directors of Vodafone Group Plc and VMware Inc. and was chief of staff to former Intel CEO Andy Grove. Frankly, she looks like the one who can understand the reality of Intel’s position in the changing world. Hopefully she and Krzanich can bypass Intel’s usual hubris and just focus on making sure it can come out on top when the winds of change stop blowing.

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With STMicroelectronics having indicated back in December that it wanted out of its chipmaking joint venture with Ericsson, and with Ericsson having politely declined to buy the half it didn’t already own, it was only a matter of time for ST-Ericsson. The question was how it would go, and now we know the answer: perhaps predictably, Ericsson will take on the modem side of the business and STMicro will take on other existing products as well as some of the manufacturing facilities. The rest will be shut down.

As for jobs, around 1,800 employees and contractors will transfer to Ericsson (mostly in Sweden, Germany, India and China) and around 950 to STMicro (mostly in France and Italy). Approximately 1,600 employees are likely to find themselves without a job – 50-80 of them in Germany and 400-600 in Sweden.

Former ST-Ericsson CEO Didier Lamouche announced his resignation a week back and, according to Monday’s announcement, his replacement from 1 April will be current COO Carlo Ferro. Ferro won’t be in place for long, though, as STMicro and Ericsson said they expected the breakup to be completed during the third quarter of the year.

Ericsson chief Hans Vestberg said his company saw a great future for the “thin modem” side of ST-Ericsson (the term refers to multimodal, low-power modems that draw their intelligence from the associated mobile application processor), which Ericsson will now run as a standalone business:

“Ericsson continues to believe that the thin modems hold a strategic value to the wireless industry. With this move Ericsson will create a highly focused ‘thin modem only’ operation — an area in which both parents have invested significant amounts to establish industry leading technology and intellectual property. Initial customer contacts give support to the belief that our modems will meet the requirements of the manufacturers in the rapidly growing smartphone and tablet market.”

ST-Ericsson had been hemorrhaging money for many quarters. Indeed, it had never been profitable since being established in 2008, but it was particularly damaged by the negative fortunes of its big two customers, Sony-Ericsson (now entirely a Sony affair) and Nokia, which used ST-Ericsson chips in its low-end phones but never adopted the NovaThor system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform for its Windows Phones, as ST-Ericsson claimed it would back in 2011. Nokia’s Lumia handsets continue to use Qualcomm chipsets, as do most other high-end smartphones these days.

ST-Ericsson had only just unveiled its latest NovaThor chipsets last month at Mobile World Congress. However, a spokewoman for Ericsson told me that these new chipsets — namely the the L8540 and L8580 lines — are being immediately discontinued. The ageing U-series, such as the U8500 that was announced in 2011 and that still powers midrange devices such as the Samsung Galaxy SIII Mini, will continue under STMicro’s auspices, she added.

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The folks at MobileGeeks took the prototype for a spin at MWC and you’ll immediately notice that the device is not quite ready for the market. Meaning: the touchscreen isn’t calibrated properly and the display refresh rate isn’t as fast as it needs to be. Still, there’s potential here if the technology improves.

Ideally, these lower-powered e-ink displays would offer fast frame rates and even color; some companies have attempted this in the past — namely Qualcomm and Pixel Qi — but actual products have been lackluster at best. In fact, Qualcomm ceased making screens with its Mirasol display technology and instead began licensing the tech last year.

Are we really close to smartphones that use e-ink touchscreens and last for weeks on a single charge? Not likely. But I could easily envision voice capability in a connected e-ink reader device.

We’re long past the point where voice is an activity limited solely to a “phone.” Communication is evolving to where we want to be in contact with others through a connected device no matter what that device is: A computer, a tablet, a game console, a television or even an e-ink reader. Well, as long we can turn the ringer off when we’re reading!

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At the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona this week, Qualcomm plans to announce four new implementations of AllJoyn that will allow for seamless notifications, audio streaming from and to any device, onboarding devices onto the network and AllJoyn platform and exporting the control interfaces for devices to other platforms on the network. So when you enter your home in an AllJoyn world your smartphone could send the song you’re listening to over to your home stereo no matter who makes the handset and who makes the stereo (or speakers). Same thing would happen if you wanted to ship the music to your car.

AllJoyn and Qualcomm’s vision for the internet of things

AllJoyn is tough to explain, in part because most of us aren’t that familiar with mesh networking. We’re far more used to having our radios send data up to the cloud and then have that data combine with other services while in a server off in a distant data center. Some companies are proposing we move that connectivity closer to home in some kind of smart gateway device ( in that case your data is sent to a box in your home and then combined with other data to perform a service).

Qualcomm, however, is thinking a bit differently. “I don’t need to control my light bulb from Tahiti,” says Rob Chandhok, president of Qualcomm’s Innovation Center. “When you have 1,500 connected devices in your house I don’t think you want all of them connected to the public internet.”

Instead Qualcomm has built a software overlay that can work on any processor and hopefully on any operating system. Right now it does this via an application, but Chandhok hopes that consumer electronics makers will integrate it into the firmware on their many devices in the future. He says Qualcomm already has customers, but he declined to name them. For consumers, the end result is that you can install applications on your smartphone that will work with AllJoyn compatible devices and control them from your handset.

The platform is nice, but the implementation will drive adoption.

Qualcomm has been working on the AllJoyn software development kit for a few years, and has released the basics. But today’s news tries to help speed adoption by offering not just the SDK and specs for the platform, but the implementations. It’s not enough to give someone a fishing rod, sometimes you need to teach her how to cast the line. With these implementations, especially the audio, which Qualcomm developed in conjunction with doubleTwist, it hopes to show developers and consumers how powerful the platform can be.

Chandhok expects that we will see more consumer devices hit the market at the end of the year that feature AllJoyn compatibility. When I asked him how it compared with other efforts to connect devices in the home, such as SmartThings‘ hub or Mobiplug’s gateway, he said that in many ways those companies are concerned with creating a way to get everything on the internet and then to control it. Qualcomm may work with those companies, and they can certainly incorporate AllJoyn, but again, he’s not convinced that every item needs to be online.

And if these new implementations work out and the big name customers Chandhok doesn’t reference start releasing products, he may be right. Most people don’t care if everything is online– they just want an experience and service that’s easy and provides more functionality without adding inconvenience. The next big question will be around the partners Qualcomm find to help contribute to AllJoyn, develop applications that work with it and embed AllJoyn compliant hardware and software into their devices.

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The Tegra 4 handset is anticipated in the first half of 2013 according to Nvidia, and follows ZTE’s use of Nvidia’s Tegra 2 and 3 processors and Icera modem in earlier phones. It’s also the beginning of handsets designed to wow users with full HD playback and other features that require some serious processing power.

Nvidia isn’t the only company pushing more powerful application processors and flexible modems; ST-Ericsson announced a 3GHz monstrosity today as part of its NovaThor line of integrated chips. While ST-Ericsson is only showing off a prototype, the specs clearly show that it too has visions of faster phones that require a lot of processing power.

The NovaThor also supports a huge variety of mobile radio technologies that make it useful in many geographic areas. For those who want to get technical, the NovaThor L8580 supports downlink speeds up to 150Mbps as well as LTE-FDD, LTE-TDD, HSPA+, GSM and TD-SCDMA. It has up to 17 bands in the same device and a single radio for carrier aggregation, which is what enables it to tune into frequencies in many markets. Like Broadcom’s latest modem, ST-Ericsson and Nvidia are pushing the bar when it comes to building radios that can travel far and wide even if a country uses different frequencies for their LTE deployments.

In many ways the future of phones is the same has it had been, more performance in more places. Technology is awesome.

The story was corrected on Feb. 21 to reflect the fact that ZTE is launching two phones one with the Tegra 4 and one later, using the i500 modem.

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The Austrian startup indoo.rs, which has just picked up an undisclosed high six-figure seed round, may be one such company. Very much a technology rather than marketing firm, indoo.rs is developing a platform that it hopes will be picked up by silicon vendors and handset manufacturers. Apart from locating the user based on nearby Wi-Fi and cellular signals – as Google does, for instance — the indoo.rs platform also draws on other data sources such as the handset’s accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer and compass to improve accuracy.

If that reminds you of what Qualcomm is trying to do with its IZat platform, you’re right to pick up on the similarity, only Qualcomm is hardwiring its technology into its mobile processors. Indoo.rs is taking the software angle.

Indoo.rs business development chief Marcel van der Heijden — who joined the team from investors SpeedInvest (the other backers are tecnet equity and Techinvest) — freely admitted to me that the IZat hardware approach has its advantages, particularly in terms of speed and power efficiency. However, he suggested that the software angle provided hardware independence and greater release flexibility.

What’s more, he pointed out, IZat is supported by around 12 percent of today’s Android devices, while indoo.rs’s software development kit (SDK) can target 95 percent.

So what are we looking at here, anyway? Indoo.rs’s platform has three elements. The first is a client SDK for Android devices, allowing developers to build indoor navigation capabilities into their apps – a conference organizer might use this in their show-floor app, for example.

The second is a measurement tool, for Windows and Linux, that makes it possible to import maps of a venue, annotate the map with physical features such as walls and staircases, define zones and then measure Wi-Fi “fingerprints” throughout the location. The final piece is the cloud-based back-end, which matches the user’s surroundings with a predefined map.

The hard work here is in balancing all the variables that go into accurate positioning: not only the quality of the Wi-Fi and cellular networks that are involved, but also the quality of the sensors in the handset. If indoo.rs is to succeed, it will need to produce superior algorithms.

Whether that happens remains to be seen. Qualcomm may have a lot of heft behind it, but indoo.rs isn’t going up against Qualcomm as such – indeed, it would probably quite like to gain it as a customer for its IP. In the meantime, the Austrian startup is busy joining the ARM Connected Community and, soon, the In-Location Alliance, so it’s connecting with the right people.

This story was updated at 1:30pm to correct the spelling of indoo.rs’s name.

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The Tegra 4i could support delivery of 1080p video playback on a 5-inch screen, according to the reference design Nvidia showed off with the launch (see above). The Nvidia spokesman expects features like the HD playback to become mainstream by the time these chips hit the market at the end of 2013.

Nvidia, which entered the smartphone market in 2008 with its Tegra application processor that combined its graphics processors with an ARM-based core, has high hopes for the mobile market. But its first iterations were hampered by a lack of integrated modem on the chips like Qualcomm offered. An integrated modem lowers the number of parts inside the phone as well as the overall cost.

In 2011 Nvidia purchased Icera, which makes a software defined radio that will tune into a variety of frequencies. The Tegra 4i is its first chip that integrates the Icera chip on the same die as the Tegra application processor. Thus, the chip with support LTE as well as versions of HSPA in use by U.S. carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile.

The integration will deliver a smaller chip (made at the 28 nanometer process node) that will presumably consume less power. However, in a conference call ahead of the launch, Nvidia’s spokesman didn’t have specifics on the processor’s affect on battery life — a criticism that has dogged the Nvidia chips in the past.

From a spec side, the 4i will deliver up to 2.3 GHz and compares with Qualcomm’s chips using its Krait processor. The chip uses the ARM Cortex-A9 as opposed to the ARM A15 chip the Tegra 4 will use, and it has 60 CPU cores. While not designed for tablets, it’s conceivable that the smaller, cheaper tablets might well use the Tegra 4i design according to the Nvidia spokesman.

As we head into the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona we’re likely to see several chip and handset design announcements as well as a peek into the smartphones we’ll be using next year.

This story was corrected at 11 a.m. on Feb. 19 to reflect that Nvidia purchased Icera in 2011 not in 2009.

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The Optimus Pro G goes on sale this week in South Korea, carrying Android “Jelly Bean” 4.1.2. According to a release in Korean, it will then make its way to North America and Japan in the second quarter of this year. An LG spokeswoman in London was unable to confirm European availability plans.

So, what are we looking at? Size-wise, the Optimus Pro G is an ever-so-slightly smaller rival to the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 — same thickness and screen size, but 0.9mm narrower and a good 4.4mm shorter. However, LG has made the jump to full HD: with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, the Pro G has a pixel density of 400ppi, versus the Note 2′s 267ppi. It lack’s the Note 2′s stylus, though.

Inside, the Pro G uses a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset; a slight step up from the 1.6GHz processor in the Note 2. Incidentally, this is the first outing for the Snapdragon 600, which is a successor to last year’s Snapdragon S4 series (its twin, the sequel to the S4 Pro, will be called the Snapdragon 800).

More pixels and processing power usually mean more power-drain. On this front, LG is touting the “largest battery capacity in its class” at 3,140mAh, but that’s not really much more than the Note 2′s 3,100mAh. LG also hasn’t quoted the device’s weight yet, so it’s hard to see how that compares with the Note 2′s 183g. The Note 2 has an 8MP camera and the Pro G a 13MP affair, but, given the size of a smartphone camera’s sensor, image quality will be more down to the lens and software than the megapixel count here.

Custom tweaks include “an upgraded QSlide” (LG’s answer to Samsung’s multitasking Pop-up Play feature), QuickMemo and a feature called Virtual Reality Panorama, which looks on paper to be precisely the same as Android’s stock 360-degree Photo Sphere function. The Pro G can also record video through both front- and rear-facing camera simultaneously, and it also features wireless charging.

How does this all compare with Samsung’s largest smartphone / smallest tablet? On paper, certainly, this looks to be an improvement on the Note 2, but then again there will probably be a Note 3 this year, also capitalizing on the latest chipsets and quite probably also upping the pixel count. It certainly doesn’t look like LG has done anything particularly groundbreaking here, so the real test of the Pro G’s success or otherwise will be its as-yet-unannounced pricing.

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Founded in 2008, Consert connects devices in the home like a water heater, heating and air conditioning units, pool pumps, and thermostats. The connected devices all talk to a smart meter, which has a Consert gateway inside, and Consert had been utilizing Verizon’s 3G network to connect back to its data center.

The Consert service monitors the energy consumption of these devices and uses them to participate in automated energy efficiency programs. Overall Consert had said its system can help a home owner save 10 to 20 percent on an energy bill. The company had done some trials in Fayetteville, N.C., with Rockwood Electric Utility, with CPS Energy, and Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative, but I hadn’t heard of many large commercial deployments.

Consert had managed to bring in a variety of high profile backers including GE Energy Financial Services, Verizon Ventures, Qualcomm and Constellation Energy. The company had raised at least $25 million.

The companies wouldn’t disclose the terms of the deal. It seems to me like this is yet another one of those startups that found itself knee-deep in the valley of death between pilots and commercial deployments and needed more funding or an acquirer to gear up. Toshiba says Consert will be integrated into Landis+Gyr.

The Consert service is also the latest startup to look to tackle the Internet of Things sector, where everything has a connection to deliver greater functionality. Check out Stacey Higgenbotham’s awesome Internet of Things primer this morning.

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To build the internet of things we’re going to need a lot of chips — orders of magnitude more than we have in use today. Generally those chips will fall into three categories, and each of those categories is poised to become a booming business with a lot of volume and room to grow. Let’s break it down:

Connectivity: This one is a no-brainer. If we want things to connect to the internet, we’re going to have to put radios in them. It may be Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Z-wave, ZigBee or even a 3G or 4G cellular standard (or all of the above) but there has been and will continue to be a land grab for radios among the big chip companies. The rise of connected devices is the reason Qualcomm bought Atheros back in 2011 and the reason little known microcontroller company Atmel purchased Ozmo Devices in December.

We’ll also see new products aimed at integrating radios together, not just from Broadcom — the king of radio integration — but also smaller companies such as Redpine Signals, Altair and others. And these radios will be going into more devices. Just a quick scan of Kickstarter or Indiegogo shows a plethora of home gateways, Wi-Fi enabled devices and sensors that have radios integrated from a variety of vendors. A report from the OECD on the internet of things estimates that a family of four will go from having an average of 10 devices connected to the internet now to 25 in 2017 and 50 by 2022. Every single on of those will have a radio — or multiple radios.

Control: These chips are the brains of the operation. But unlike in the personal computer or server market, where Intel and AMD fought for dominance (more truthfully, AMD tried to at least achieve profitability), or the smartphone market where Qualcomm has taken out competitors ranging from Texas Instruments and Freescale on the application processor side (leaving Apple, Samsung, Broadcom and Mediatek standing), this market has a much wider variety of players known for their embedded processors and microcontroller. The one name that spans all of these industries is ARM.

At the low end, microcontrollers can range from 8-bit processors that manage setting on your microwave to higher-end chips inside a set-top box. Companies like Freescale, Texas Instruments, Atmel, Intel and STMicroelectronics all are pushing their microcontrollers (MCUs) inside the internet of things. The variety of use cases and devices inside connected devices mean some gadgets will need more power savings than performance or merely just a cheap 32-bit chips designed for a more industrial application. Many of these companies have an advantage for the internet of things because they are used to supporting a wide variety of end products with their firmware and sales teams.

They have designed their chips to be modular. If the bigger players want to play here they will have to build out multiple lines of chips with differing performance specs that can be supported across a wide range of end devices. That’s very different from building out a line of chips with slightly different specs all designed for servers. I bet a few of the big vendors, especially on the connectivity side, might try to acquire this knowledge.

Botanicalls moisture sensing system.

And since many of these sensors will be integrated onto small packages with radios and maybe even MCUs there will be a lot of value for a company that can pop all of the above onto a system on a chip — it’s cheaper, smaller and more power efficient. So consolidation will happen within these categories as well as across them as more devices get online and we ask them to share more information about their environment.

So be they MEMs, microcontrollers or radios, there’s a lot of silicon (or maybe gallium arsenide) inside the internet of things. And the types of chips required will stretch the silicon industry — that has been primarily focused on keeping up with the performance requirements of Moore’s Law — into new directions. Power savings, integration and size will matter when it comes to connected devices more so than the all out race for performance that has dominated the chip industry for decades.

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