Enter Texas Instruments, which announced new chipsets for chargers on Thursday to help in the battery department. This solution won’t let your device run longer on a single charge, so don’t get that excited. However, smart chargers that use TI’s new MaxLife technology will recharge batteries up to 30 percent faster and allow the overall lifetime of a battery to last longer. That means a full charge on a one-year old device battery won’t differ that much from a freshly new power pack; typically battery capacity degrades over time.

Here’s how TI describes the new chipsets, which will cost hardware makers between $2.07 and $2.50 each in bundles of 1,000 units:

Traditional software-controlled battery management systems – whether implemented with a microcontroller, PMIC (power management integrated circuit) or digital signal processor – are limited in their ability to predict accurate battery capacity and translate that information into run time. The new bq27530 and bq24160 chipset for 2.5-A charge rates and the bq27531 and bq24192 chipset for 4.5-A charge rates give designers greater flexibility by having the gauge control the charger directly.

This autonomous battery management system reduces software overhead, improves battery safety and security, provides better thermal management and allows a designer to adapt the charging algorithm to support different platforms and newer higher capacity batteries.

By intelligently monitoring both the charger and the device battery, TI is delivering a more efficient charge to lithium-ion batteries. The faster charging rate will be welcome on a daily basis for sure. And since the battery can retain more of its charge a year or more out, there’s less concern with buying a device on a two-year contract and worrying about how long a full battery lasts in that second year. Best of all, TI’s system should work with any standard Li-Ion battery in mobile devices today.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010-2015

In the course of breaking up, sometimes it’s simpler to shed shared assets. Ericsson and STMicroelectronics are in the process of doing just that – having already decided which partner gets what out of their cash-hemorrhaging joint venture, ST-Ericsson, the companies are now seeing what they can get for the leftovers. And in this case, part of that portfolio entails ST-Ericsson’s global navigation satellite system (GNSS) business.

The ST-Ericsson GNSS portfolio includes handset receivers for interacting with both the U.S. GPS system and Russia’s GLONASS location service. On Tuesday, the companies said they had signed a “definitive agreement” to sell the assets and intellectual property surrounding this business. That includes 130 staffers in Daventry (UK), Bangalore (India) and Singapore.

The deal will apparently “reduce the joint venture’s cash needs by approximately $90 million.” There is, however, one rather important detail that’s missing.

Who’s buying?

ST-Ericsson is being almost entirely opaque on this point, saying only that the team has “found a new home at a leading player in the semiconductor industry.” Which leaves us with something of a guessing game.

The current crop of ST-Ericsson GNSS receivers are part of the joint venture’s NovaThor system-on-a-chip platform, but that’s now been cancelled due to the break-up. And ST-Ericsson has never publicly disclosed who its other GNSS customers are.

It may or may not be relevant to note that one of the more recent ST-Ericsson GNSS receivers, the CG1960, has a very small form factor and has been tailored for low-powered applications, such as in smart watches and cameras. With wearables set to be a boom market, this technology could be quite attractive to certain players.

It’s unlikely Qualcomm is the buyer, as it already has a rich GNSS product portfolio. Samsung has been using SkyWorks in the last year or so. It could possibly be Texas Instruments, which is making a big push into embedded systems, including wearables.

But really, your guess is as good as mine.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• The big theme of MWC: How to live in a connected world

The details on the new BeagleBone board are here, but basically TI is offering a 1 GHz ARM processor plus the connectivity and power components on a single board for $45. That’s a lot of compute power for a little price. While the Raspberry Pi costs $35 it doesn’t have as many ports built in, and Adrian Valenzuel, marketing director of TI’s Sitara ARM processor product line, said it also isn’t as open.

When pressed, he said that people who build with the Pi can’t buy the hardware that comprises the Pi board on the open market, unlike with the TI board. He’s right. The chip on the Pi is built by Broadcom, but it’s not something that anyone can simply order and play with. On the flip side, Atmel, the company that makes the processors on the Arduino boards, sells those components and has released software supporting the Arduino community.

And while some people might be content to play with $35 Pis, there are plenty of people thinking about pro-quality projects that might want to get even more granular than the board, and try their hand at tweaking the components around the processor. That’s TI’s sales pitch as it moves down market to the class of makers who love the power of the Pi over the ubiquitous (in Maker circles, anyway) Arduino.

TI’s hope is that by getting people playing with its board it can sell components and attract a user base that wants to play with its hardware. It may never be a huge business, but it’s one that chip makers are paying attention to. Earlier this year AMD introduced its GizmoSphere board, a $200 board and developer community for makers.

While none of the companies involved are willing to share any sense of how these products may help them financially, it’s clear that chip firms are eying the maker community as a market worth paying attention to, especially as the internet of things heats up.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Cloud computing’s impact on chip and hardware design
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

The company announced the ST-Ericsson deal at Mobile World Congress in February. ST-Ericsson’s future chipsets were to include a dedicated augmented reality (AR) processor using Metaio’s designs – much as is the case with the dedicated GPUs we find in mobile devices today, the benefit of a dedicated AR chip is to cut down the power-draw required by specific functions, in this case augmented reality, so people can fire up applications using those functions without worrying about their phone or tablet dying too quickly.

However, less than a month later STMicroelectronics and Ericsson announced the end of their chipset joint venture, along with the cancellation of the ST-Ericsson NovaThor chipsets that were also announced at Mobile World Congress. Nonetheless, Metaio told me at the time that it was still in talks with both STMicro and Ericsson about the use of its technology.

According to Metaio spokeswoman Anett Gläsel-Maslov, these talks are still underway, as are negotiations with other (undisclosed) companies. What’s more, she said, the company is near-certain that it will see its “AR Engine in devices by the end of the year”.

To develop its AR Engine designs further, Metaio is to open a new research facility in Dallas, the company said on Wednesday. Metaio already has an office in San Francisco, so it’s not a matter of getting closer to potential customers – instead, Gläsel-Maslov told me, the firm hopes to scoop up engineers who might be at a loose end following Texas Instruments’ winding-down of its OMAP mobile processor business.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Report: Mobile Augmented Reality Today and Tomorrow

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

This brings Qualcomm up to the third largest chipmaker in the world for 2012 and shows how the shift to mobile devices and consolidation in the server and PC market has changed the fortunes of the chip industry’s biggest players. So while Intel is still the top chipmaker in the world, it is expected to see its sales decline by 2.4 percent, roughly in line with the chip industry as a whole. Of course, with an anticipated $47.54 billion in sales and a whopping 15.7 percent of the overall chip market this isn’t surprising.

Qualcomm’s growth came off of a much smaller base to reach an anticipated $10.2$12.98 billion in sales. Other notable bits from the IHS rankings include Samsung still at the No. 2 spot and experiencing growth above and beyond the overall industry thanks to its share in Samsung-LED. LED lighting and certain sensor components grew this year as well. Broadcom and Nvidia should also see higher percentage growth while both Texas Instruments, Freescale and AMD were the biggest losers. IHS iSuppli expects this downturn to be short-lived as long as the global economy continues to stabilize. It anticipates growth in 2013 to hit 8 percent.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing’s impact on chip and hardware design
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

This means that not only is TI confident that there’s a market for a new type of high performance computing chip (as well as one for webscale and cloud providers), but that TI thinks that integrating up to five 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports on that chip will make it more ideal for the new demands on data centers. As Tom Flanagan, the director of multicore strategy at TI said, the integration of 10-Gigabit Ethernet on the system on a chip means that the top-of-rack switch could be rendered moot.

Others are also thinking about the future of the top-of-rack chip, especially in scale-out data centers where traffic doesn’t stay confined to a rack but needs to communicate with servers in racks across mammoth data centers. For example, Frank Frankovsky of Facebook has said he’s trying to think outside that architecture. Facebook has also stepped up to support the developing ARM-based server ecosystem, appearing onstage as AMD said it would license the ARM core for server chips and joining an industry group aimed at building software for ARM servers.

The KeyStone purpose-built server architecture.

The integration of networking onto a single die (or chip) is an architecture that Intel talked up at its developer conference in September, but it plans to integrate 100 gigabit networking on the chip and it plans to do this by some unspecified future time. Texas Instruments says it is sampling its KeyStone architecture-based chips and they will be ready for servers by next year. Unlike some of the recent announcements from ARM partners in the server arena, TI plans to use the existing 32-bit ARM A15 processor cores married to its math-oriented digital signal processing chips, as opposed to the next generation A-50 cores that support 64-bit computing, but won’t be ready for servers until late in 2013 or early 2014.

Servers aren’t the only area where TI is trying out the ARM+DSP combo. It plans to use them for sensor-based chips as well as in normal networking equipment — both industries where TI has a long history. I have no idea if Texas Instruments can make DSP chips inside servers happen (the company has been talking this up since 2009) but the marriage of DSP and ARM, as well as integrated networking seems to offer a powerful product for real-time data analysis where you want to move and process a lot of information in parallel quickly.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing’s impact on chip and hardware design
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech

Indeed, TI’s OMAP line has had few major product design wins of late. It powers the new Kindle Fire HD tablets, the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, and a fair number of Motorola phones. Even Motorola, however, has recently switched to alternatives from Qualcomm: The company’s new Razr HD and Razr HD Maxx will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip; a change from the prior Razr models that relied on a TI OMAP.

Texas Instrument’s OMAP woes, however, could be a benefit to Amazon in several ways. First, although the up-front cost would be massive, the purchase could cut the unit costs to produce hardware such as Kindle e-readers and tablets. Currently, Amazon sells hardware roughly for cost, with hopes of recouping revenues and profits through content sales. By producing chips in house, profits could be seen on the hardware although it could time to realize such benefits; it’s not cheap to sink money into long-term capital such as chip fabrication production lines.

Having its own chip business could lead Amazon to customize the silicon so that its optimized for Amazon’s products. This approach is similar to that of Apple, which creates custom chips that are made to run iOS to its full potential. While Amazon doesn’t have a mobile operating system of it’s own, the company is using Google Android as a base with Amazon software for the user interface. With a chip business, Amazon could improve the performance of its tablets by optimizing the union of silicon and software.

This situation does cause one to think about Amazon getting into the smartphone business as well. As noted, TI’s OMAP chip already powers numerous Motorola handsets as well as my own Samsung Galaxy Nexus handset. I’d say there’s an outlier chance here as the smartphone market isn’t an easy one to crack. It’s not out the realm of possibilities, of course, and if Amazon is going to spend billions for a chip business, it will surely want to maximize its return on that investment.

That leads to one other possibility here if Amazon were to buy the OMAP business from TI: Servers. While Amazon is known as a retail and content company, it’s a cloud company when you peek inside.

The company relies heavily on its cloud services for the retail experience, Whispersync technology and its AWS, or Amazon Web Services which let users rent computing storage and processing power in the cloud. For some time, x86 chips have powered cloud-based servers, but cloud computing can be done on smartphone chips as well; an OMAP purchase could reduce Amazon’s cloud costs and even lead to custom hardware that’s more power efficient.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Tablets wars: Apple is from Venus, Amazon is from Mars
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage

To date, only a handful of Intel-powered smartphones are actually sold around the world and the sales figures for them aren’t likely  meaningful to the market as a whole. Contrast that to the hundreds of millions of handsets powered by Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia to name a few, and you can see the dilemma that Intel is in: Intel Inside was great when the PC market was booming, but smartphones and tablets are the big sellers now.

The biggest obstacle to Intel’s smartphone success has long been the amount of energy used by its chips, which have generally been designed for personal computers. For the past three years, Intel has been working to reduce the power consumption of its silicon and only recently has been able to compete with low-powered chips based on the ARM architecture.

The approach between the two has been completely opposite. ARM chips have always focused on low energy usage first and then have added new features and performance gains over time. Intel builds high performing silicon but had to reduced the energy consumption.

As a result of Intel’s efforts, however, the two are closer in both areas than ever before and perhaps Intel hasn’t missed the boat in mobiles. Sure, it was left on the docks for the past few years but has recently impressed: My first look at an Intel-powered Android tablet earlier this year showed outstanding performance with the promise of equal battery life to an ARM-powered slate. Billions of additional smartphones and tablets are expected to sell over the next several years, so perhaps there’s room for Intel yet.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The big theme of MWC: How to live in a connected world
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room