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Take a peek at the secret upheaval in the chip world

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 19:32:31 +0000

Recent financial news from the big chip firms has been grim. But the bad news goes beyond worries about the global economic climate and the death of the PC. In the last five years, computing has gone from something done on a server or a PC, to all-day continuous computing on a variety of devices. And the chip giants from Intel to Qualcomm are feeling the repercussions from that giant shift.

Chip company AMD said its sales would come in 10 percent lower in the third quarter compared with sales the previous quarter. The news, which was released on Thursday evening was a shocking decline from AMD’s previously announced expectations that third quarter sales would decline by 1 percent, plus or minus 3 percent, sequentially.

AMD blamed its troubles on the macroeconomic environment, which has hurt chip sales, and others are blaming it on yesterday’s reported decline in PC sales. Intel and ARM are also leery about the sales environment. But what’s happening here goes beyond AMD’s refusal to embrace mobile a few years back, and beyond worries about a European decline. Thanks to ubiquitous broadband at home and via mobile devices as well as an increasing reliance on the internet, chip firms are embracing heterogeneity in their product lines.

From one competitor and strict product divisions to a free-for all.

Phones, tablets and netbooks! Oh my!

Instead of being a specialty vendor of a single architecture, firms from Intel to Qualcomm or AMD to Nvidia are embracing new types of chips and everyone is competing in new ways. It’s like a bakery or a butcher shop suddenly facing off against a supermarket. The competitive landscape has been altered and everyone has to adapt.

So while an overall decline is sales is occurring, and the PC market is clearly hurting as numbers from Gartner and iSuppli yesterday show, the big picture is that we’re going from two separate architectures locked into a defined space to more architectures and many vendors in a free-for-all.

This isn’t a binary competition either between ARM and x86. Because ARM licenses its IP to a variety of vendors we’re also seeing companies such as Apple, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and others innovate and offer different features, designs and price points. On the server side ARM is making progress with vendors and we’ll see ARM-based servers in production by the end of the year. There are other new architectures out there for processing big data that are also gaining ground. Tilera, a maker of a RISC-based many-core chip has silicon running in production on a few thousand servers today.

How this macro-shift plays out in today’s world

On Wednesday an analyst downgraded Qualcomm because of looming competition from Intel in the market for mobile chips, because Intel is prepping a combo chip that has both an Atom processor and baseband chip to act as a radio. Qualcomm has owned that market for years, but after Intel’s purchase of Infineon back in 2011, Intel may become more of a threat.
Apple’s A6 chip inside the iPhone 5 contains a custom-build Apple CPU. This may add fuel to the almost ever-present rumors that Apple might dump Intel chips in its MacBooks for its own chips.
ARM this week unveiled a built a networking layer into its designs aimed at the server market trying to deliver the kind of fast IO that servers need.
In June AMD and ARM created a group of companies called the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture Foundation, pushing for new software for this heterogeneous world. Qualcomm last week joined that group, which gives it far more credibility.

What’s next?

So right now, chip firms are lowering their sales expectations, writing down excess inventory and keeping an eye on the global economic picture. But they are also taking strategic steps such as the creation of the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture Foundation and integrating other types of chips with their core products as Nvidia and Intel are doing.

The way we access computing has changed as people have gone mobile, while on the back end the architecture is also undergoing its own shift to deliver the type of web-based services we want and need. It would be suicide if the chip firms whose products are the basic building block of computation didn’t adapt. As they do, keep an eye on the average selling price of chips (I expect them to drop in a competitive environment) as well as how these players take on the next big disruption coming to the computing and chip space — the Internet of Things.

At that point it won’t be Intel versus Qualcomm, but ARM trying to take market share from Freescale and major firms prowling around for buys in the microcontroller, timing and maybe even embedded OS sector. What’s happened so far as Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy, notes, is that computing cycles that were once limited to desktops and servers have become continuous throughout the day and over multiple devices. This occurred in part because of the adoption of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS helped unify the once-fragmented mobile OS market.

Moorhead expects that trend to continue even further as we connect more and more devices to the Internet. And none of the big giants in the chip world are going to let that opportunity go.

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Mobile tech’s future isn’t in the phone, it’s in your car.

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:23:22 +0000

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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Mobile World Congress: Don't Call It a Phone Show

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:57:19 +0000

Mobile World Congress, which kicks off Monday in Barcelona, is the place to be for everyone who’s anyone in the mobile phone ecosystem, and increasingly that includes everyone whose anyone in the technology industry. Over the last few years the event and the industry have shifted from being about mobile phones to being about always-on connectivity. Mobile broadband has changed the value of the mobile ecosystem and thus the players who care about it.

For example, keynote speakers this year include a U.S. cable company talking about its wireless deployment; Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe, presumably defending Flash; and Google’s Eric Schmidt taking about the search engine’s plans to rule the mobile world and the usual array of operator and handset executives.

So what can we expect from the show? Here’s a list of the big topics and what they means for the end user who just wants to surf the web anywhere he or she is:

Better, faster, cheaper chips for mobile devices. Qualcomm, Marvell, Texas Instruments and a range of other silicon vendors will announce everything from applications processors that can deliver enough power for true HD video to silicon that integrates multiple radios on a chip. For the average Joe this means devices coming out in the next two years will pack more of a visual punch and surf the web at lighting speeds on whatever network is available. I think we’re also going to see more ways to extend our mobile devices, such as pico projectors and chips to enable wireless transfer of content off the phone, but that’s going to still be an early adopter technology in 2010.
New software and gear from deep-packet inspection companies. Wi-Fi offload was all the buzz last year as mobile data use from iPhones and other smartphones threatened to swamp operators’ networks. Wi-Fi offload is still hot, but it’s not going to be the star — policy management is. For normal people this means that pricing for your mobile bits is going to change. Carriers will have the tools from Bridgewater Systems, Sandvine, Camiant and others to parse your mobile habits into the type of application you’re using (VoIP, downloading video, streaming, etc.) and the time of day, and start billing you differently based on those factors.
Phones lose their luster as they gain functionality. This is a phone show, even if Nokia, the largest phone maker isn’t bringing a new one to the party, but while plenty of them will launch, the excitement will be around smartbooks, tablets and a host of other devices that incorporate mobile broadband, but maybe not voice. However, the phones that are launching will likely be faster and cooler than the current hunk of metal and plastic in your pocket, with better screens, app stores and features that make it easier than ever to start surfing the web. Plus, those features will start moving down market into cheaper phones thanks to new chips and software.
New network operators change the market. Your wireless provider no longer has to be a phone company. Cable providers are getting into the game with mobile broadband offerings that in some cases beat out the wireless ones. For example, Bend Broadband in Oregon has the nation’s faster wireless network, even if it’s not used for vocie. And later this spring Cox, a U.S. cable provider, will launch its own wireless network aimed at offering subscribers mobile broadband rather than mobile voice. The impact of these players could be profound. Faster speeds (and maybe that policy software that can help guarantee levels of service) could make VoIP a real alternative to actual voice handsets. Or consumers might pick up a cheap prepaid mobile phone for voice and carry around an iPod touch-like device on the cable network for web inquiries.

In other words, it’s gonna be big.

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Image courtesy of Flickr user andy_c

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

Android Gets Some Serious Support for Consumer Devices

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:13:55 +0000

ARM and more than 35 other companies have banded together to create an alliance dubbed the Solution Center for Android, which is aimed at increasing the resources available for developers trying to build for the relatively young OS on top of ARM hardware. Android, an open-source, Linux-based OS pioneered by Google, is the underlying operating system in several popular smartphones such as those from HTC and the Motorola Droid. However, as computer companies plan netbooks based on the ARM architecture (known as smartbooks), ARM and several other companies, including Texas Instruments and Mentor Graphics, determined that the Android OS needed more infrastructure to support these more complicated consumer devices.

The Solution Center will serve as a go-to place for developers to get information on development tools, as well as resources and services optimized specifically for Android on the ARM platform. The end result should be better devices that are able to get to market quickly. And because ARM is so prevalent in other consumer gadgets scattered around the home, it’s possible that the alliance will help bring Android to more devices.

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The Daily Show‘s Stepchildren Now Include Escapist News Network and Newsish

Liz Shannon Miller — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:34:05 +0000

Every icon has his or her imitators, and while The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart didn’t invent the concept of snarking at the news in a quasi-reporting format, his influence has had a profound impact not just on the television world, but on web video. And shows that draw inspiration from the format continue to find fresh approaches to the idea.

Of course, the easiest way to put a new spin on an old idea is to tailor it for a specific audience — which the the guys and gals from sketch comedy team Loading Ready Run nail with the Escapist News Network by focusing exclusively on video game news and culture. Hosted by Graham Stark and Kathleen DeVere, ENN‘s one-liners and punchlines can be a little dense for those outside the video game world, but even a casual gamer can appreciate a story on the gaming site Popcap that references the “enslavement of the human race via the highly addictive drug Bejeweled [Popcap's insanely popular puzzle game].”

In fairness, Escapist News Network‘s deadpan approach and dual anchor set-up is closer in style to Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update segment, which predates Stewart’s entire career by at least a decade. But by combining real news and actual jokes, as well as correspondent segments that emulate the Stephen Colbert school of interviewing, the show still manages to live up to the Daily Show legacy, and also do it proud with sharp production values and its own unique voice.

Closer to the Stewart model is the self-styled Walter Cronkite for YouTube, Bri Holt of Newsish. Closer to a vlog than a full newscast, Holt (who graduated from UCSD in 2008 with a degree in political science and film) uses his platform to discuss hard news issues like the economics of Medicare and deregulation, albeit with a frustrated, “why is the world so dumb” tone that’s easy to engage with.

While episodes could be more tightly edited and condensed, Newsish has slowly found its audience thanks to videos mocking, for example, a recent letter Rep. Michelle Bachmann read to the House of Representatives on the subject of alleged sex clinics in schools. The Newsish YouTube channel has close to 1,500 subscribers, and episodes average in the 1,000-10,000 range.

And these are only two recent examples of the format, which has also been explored by shows like Political Lunch, Your Geek News and The Young Turks. It’s a boom industry. Because what Stewart and The Daily Show have done is tear down the idea that because you sit at a news desk and stare into the camera, you’re supposed to give a quasi-impartial spin on the day’s events. It means that actual news programs anchored by impartial news anchors may become as archaic as cathode-ray tube TVs. But that’s just one of the side effects of the blogosphere, where opinion sometimes bears more weight than fact.

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Google Chrome OS & What It Means For Future of Computing

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:35:13 +0000

Updated: Today Google went wild and announced its plans to create the Chrome operating system, which it says will be designed to run on netbooks. But it’s really an attempt to keep Google relevant as an advertising powerhouse as consumers begin spending more time playing with web-connected apps than the web itself. It’s the search giant’s reaction to a wholesale change in computing driven by ubiquitous wireless access and mobility. The Chrome OS is another step in allowing Google to create what we’ve called the OS for advertising — an ad platform that extends across all devices and all screens. So let’s break it down:

WHAT THE WEB IS SAYING:
jkOnTheRun: A web, or cloud, OS that puts the bulk of all user activity firmly up in the web. No heavy lifting on the user’s netbook; that will all take place up in the cloud with the Chrome OS handling it all. This is so clever on Google’s part, and could very well turn the next page on cloud computing.
The New York Times: Google’s plans for the new operating system fit its Internet-centric vision of computing. Google believes that software delivered over the Web will play an increasingly central role, replacing software programs that run on the desktop.
ReadWriteWeb: With this, Google can obviously put its own web apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs at the center of the user experience, and this is surely part of Google’s motivation behind releasing this OS.
TechDirt: Part of the appeal of the growth of the web itself (and Google with it) is the fact that it’s made the whole operating system less and less integral to the computing experience. With the move towards more of a “cloud” based world (which Google has been a big part of driving) just doesn’t value the operating system as much as in the past. So why jump on that bandwagon now?
Lifehacker: To say the Chrome OS will face stiff competition is quite an understatement, with Intel developing its own lightweight, Linux-based netbook platform, Windows XP emerging as a force in netbook OS share, and Microsoft itself likely to fight tooth and nail to keep yet another upstart from encroaching on the one area of PC sales that is still seeing significant growth.
Search Engine Journal: Only Microsoft can kill Windows XP, and that would happen as soon a Windows 7 becomes successful. Google Chrome OS is a Windows 7 rival, the same way that Google Chrome is a rival of IE.
The Register: Many companies have tried to muscle in on Microsoft’s home turf of desktop and laptop operating systems, ever since the company first sewed the market up. And none have succeeded. But then none have had the muscle or money of Google nor have they had its central position in web services to use as a foot in the door. And Google has shown, with Android and the handset manufacturers, that it can establish strong beachheads, where others have failed.
The Wall Street Journal: Google’s incursion into operating systems could galvanize its critics, including privacy groups and competitors, who argued that the online search company already collects vast amounts of information about consumers’ Internet use. While Google is still a tiny player in many of the new markets it is exploring, like mobile phone software and online applications, some worry it could leverage its massive online search market share to quickly grow its share of new industries as well, gathering even more data about its users.

First the Features:

Chrome OS will run on both ARM and x86-based chips and is designed for netbooks.
The architecture is Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.
Apps developed for Chrome OS will run on Google Chrome OS, and on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Designed to boot and get folks on the web in seconds.
Designed so viruses and malware aren’t an issue.
It’s not going to be out until the second half of 2010 on consumer netbooks.

What It Means:

Google sees a browser-like experience being key to netbooks and believes that rather than just surf the web, consumers want to play and use the apps.
Microsoft, which has not ported its Windows 7 to ARM-based chips that will be designed into the future version of netbooks, and which has priced Windows 7 for Intel-based netbooks fairly high, will be scrambling if Chrome OS succeeds.
The fact that apps designed for Chrome OS will work anywhere should attract developers to the platform, and as we know, developers are the new kingmakers in today’s app-focused world.
While the world was waiting for Google’s mobile Android OS on netbooks, Google has suddenly pulled Chrome OS out of its hat. James over at jkOnTheRun calls it a case of classic misdirection. Google explains that Chrome OS is for the web, while Android is for devices — from phones to set-top boxes. We wonder why Chrome OS wouldn’t be more appropriate for the so-called fourth-screen devices.
Building a special-purpose, lightweight browser specifically for the netbook might address some of the difficulties that developers were having porting Android to netbooks, such as issues porting to a keyboard-based user interface rather than touchscreens and trackballs.
This all follows in line with Google’s love of everything in the browser, such as its embrace of HTML5 that makes it easy to bring a desktop experience (especially with video) seamlessly to the browser.
Chipmakers betting on ARM-based netbooks such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments will win if the user experience is robust enough to wean people from their familiarity with Windows.

Why Computing Needs to Change

The promise of broadband everywhere is changing the way we can communicate online. Google’s Chrome OS may or may not make it, but the attempt shows how far the industry has come from a bulky PC chained to a desk by its power cord and Ethernet cable. The computer is evolving from those dinosaurs to a smaller, mobile model that is always connected to the web. The iPhone brought us apps that are lightweight so users don’t get bogged down by smaller processors and slower wireless web connections on mobile devices. Google’s Chrome OS attempts to keep that speed, while preserving a platform for Google to make money through advertising. But it’s far from a done deal.

Why We’re Not Going to Get Too Excited Yet

It’s not coming out for a year. A lot can happen in a year.
Launching a browser is one thing (and so far, Chrome has received mixed reviews) and building an OS is another, and right now this is an announcement, not a product.
Does the world need a netbook-focused OS?
Can Google convince carriers, which aren’t big fans of the search giant, that selling netbooks with Chrome OS is the way to go? Most analysts expect carriers to become a huge distribution channel for netbooks.

If Google wants to be the advertising OS, its products need to deliver the optimal web experience on every device. Judging from some of the Google blog post notes, the Chrome OS will have instant-on and act as an interface between a netbook and the web, rather than feel like a traditional OS. In fact, it almost sounds like a…browser. Which may be the point, since Om argues that the browser is where the action will be in the coming years, and as we consume more of our web experience through apps, a full-fledged browser seems a little clunky.

Chrome OS isn’t expected to land on consumer devices until the second half of 2010, but by designing it for the new model of computing, Google has the potential to affect the netbook market like the iPhone did in the cell phone world. And since Microsoft decided not to port its Windows 7 software to ARM chips, which was going to be a thorn in the side of Qualcomm and Texas Instruments as they tried to design netbooks that could attract consumers already familiar with Windows, Google’s Chrome OS has an opening. TI has already lauded Google’s efforts. So while we’re not getting too excited, we’re definitely going to watch this develop. In the meantime, check out what everyone else is saying around the web in our handy compilation above.

Update: Google has added some information noting that the Chrome OS will be free, and listing a few of their partners in this endeavor, including several notebook makers and chip companies making ARM-based application processors for netbooks and smartphones.

Additional reporting by Jennifer Martinez.

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Europe Gets Handset Makers to Agree to Universal Charger

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:26:32 +0000

Nokia, Motorola, Research in Motion, Apple (yes, even Apple) and six other cell phone makers have agreed to a European Commission request to develop a universal charger. The agreement was announced today by the the EC. The new handsets will use Micro-USB connectors, and will be available in Europe beginning next year. The GSM Association had been working on a similar effort to deliver a universal charger by 2012.

Importantly, only data-enabled phones will be able to accept the universal charger, since those are the phones that currently contain Micro-USB ports. While the Micro-USB standard may be replaced by a different one someday, for now having a universal charger will make it easier to replenish phones while on the road. As for reducing waste, I’m less certain that will happen unless cell phone providers stop including a charger with each phone. The EC hopes that the universal charger will spread beyond its borders, which is likely to happen given that the powerful GSM Association is also in favor of such a standard, but perhaps not by 2010.

Our friends at jkOnTheRun are wondering if this standard will make its way to the US? I certainly hope so.

Micro-USB and USB image courtesy of George Shuklin

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TI Wants to Use DSPs for Low-power Computing

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:28:37 +0000

Texas Instruments is looking to hop on the trend of using non x86 processors in the data center, according to Kathy Brown, general manager of the company’s wireless base station infrastructure business. Last night over dinner, Brown said the wireless chip powerhouse was trying to build a software framework that would enable researchers to run Linux on its high-end digital signal processing chips (DSP) used for scientific computing.

The idea of using DSPs is not new. Tensilica, a DSP core company, is working with researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to build a supercomputer made up of millions of their configurable cores. The chief advantage in using DSPs is that they are very power efficient. So as “performance per watt” becomes the hot term in both the high-performance computing world and in the data center, chip companies are seeing an opportunity.

So are companies that operate their own data center. For example, Microsoft is researching the power savings associated with running some of its jobs on Intel’s low-power Atom processor.

Without a high-end server chip business to protect like Intel does, other chip companies are trying to muscle in with low-power options. Texas Instruments and Tensilica are using DSPs, while HPC company SiCortex told me last week it may broaden its market beyond supercomputing in the next year with its specially designed ASIC. But in order to take advantage of such specially designed chips, software must be adapted or new programs be built — something scientists are comfortable doing, but for which general IT specialists may not have time.

If TI truly wants to gain traction in this space, it may have to take a page from Nvidia’s book. Nvidia pushed its graphics processors into scientific computing using a software tool called CUDA, which helped people adapt their programs written for x86 machines to run on GPUs. Its efforts turned in fiscal third-quarter sales in its scientific computing division that grew by 31 percent over the same period in 2008 — even as sales in desktops and notebooks fell by 33 percent. However, those efforts — which can also reduce power consumption — are aimed at adding more speed.

Regardless, when it comes to scientific computing, and perhaps web-scale computing, scientists and data center operators seem willing to adapt to a different processor architecture if the job is big enough to merit the efforts on the software side. So, heterogeneous computing may become more mainstream.

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Texas Instruments to Offer a Champion Chipset for Mobile

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:00:03 +0000

Texas Instruments is expected to this week release details of its next-generation application processor, the OMAP 4 family of chips, which has made my love for Nvidia’s APX25000 processor grow cold. I’m faithless when a chipmaker shows me the prospect of 1080p video playback, 10 times the web surfing speed, a 20 megapixel camera and 130 hours of audio playback on a mobile device. And did I mention that this is a true dual-core chipset? Chips like this mean mobile computing is really living up its computing label.

Before I get overexcited about the prospect of two cores running at 1 Ghz on a chipset that consumes less than 1 watt, the bad news is it won’t be available in devices until 2010, with the actual chipset sampling in 2009. But I can wait. After all, Nvidia’s Tegra chipset built around the APX25000 was launched a year ago and it’s still not in any devices. TI’s announcing the OMAP 4 family as part of the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona this week. Since the current generation of TI applications processors were created for smartphones about four years ago, the line really needed a refresh for this era of ubiquitous wireless.

This is a nice refresh. Other than a wicked-cool feature set, the most notable aspect of this announcement is TI’s use of the ARM Cortex- A9 — a dual-core design that uses two processors running symmetrically. Eight companies have licensed the Cortex A9, but so far it hasn’t appeared in products. TI is one of the first ARM licensees to talk about plans for the IP core in mobile phones. However, more may come emerge the show.

The dual-core nature of the processor means it can double the performance when needed without doubling the power consumption all the time, which is handy when trying to make a battery last all day. With this generation of processor, Texas Instruments is answering Nvidia’s entrance into the market last year with the graphics-capable Tegra chipset and Qualcomm’s multicore Snapdragon processor. My assumption is that TI is also trying to refute the idea that x86 based chips, such as Intel’s Atom, have a performance advantage over ARM-based chipsets.

These are only technical specs for a chipset that could be designed into devices ranging from a netbook to a superphone. It will be at last a year, if not longer before, anyone gets to see how device makers respond to the promise of such power. To take true advantage of the multicore nature of the chipset, operating systems will have to be programmed to use them. It’s a long road from a sexy chip design like this to a sexy product, but keep your eyes open for the device built on this platform.

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Wireless Built the Notebook Boom

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:07:41 +0000

Yesterday’s news that notebooks had overtaken PCs in the number of units sold last quarter owes a huge debt to Wi-Fi and a smaller one to 3G cellular networks. Without those Intel unwired commercials and images of folks surfing the web at Starbucks or sitting in parks, notebooks would still be expensive toys of road warriors. My bet is, in the next decade, those using desktops will be researchers, engineers and people needing access to computers closer in size and performance to desktop supercomputers. That, and folks who want to use a desktop as a media server.

The rest of us will tote ultra-thin laptops (especially if Dell releases a sweet one that’s not too pricey), laptops, netbooks and smartphones that have screen sizes between 3 and 5 inches — likely two of these options. So what does this mean for the electronics industry?

More silicon packed into the computers in the form of varying radios for communicating with everything from Wi-Fi and GPS to a variety of 3G and 4G cellular networks. Qualcomm’s Gobi platform or Broadcom’s integrated chip strategy is going to play well here.
A fight between efficiency and power will pave the way for alternative chip architectures. Shrinking an x86 processors as Intel has done with Atom is good, but it doesn’t create an ideal mobile device because it still requires too much power. ARM architecture in chips from Qualcomm and Texas Instruments use far less power, while combo x86/GPU platforms such as Nvidia’s ION platform would offer far more performance.
Form will matter as much as function, because a computer that’s used in public will need to reflect a certain sense of style. Apple wins big in this category, but Dell and other vendors are trying to enhance both their actual designs and their brands.
Anyone coming up with a lighter or longer-lasting battery will make a bundle (provided it doesn’t explode), and those focused on less power-hungry displays such as organic, light-emitting diodes could also win big. Sony, Samsung, and scores of university researchers are tackling these problems.

There are plenty of other things that will change, from the way we integrate mobile computing into society and social rituals (anyone sat down to eat lately with people who take photos of their food with their phones to send to their Facebooks pages?), to the tasks we ask those devices to perform. Faster wireless networks in the form of LTE and WiMAX, or cheaper ones in the form of white spaces, will make this transition accessible from a cost and network speed perspective. Let’s get mobile.

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