Displaying items by tag: Qualcomm

Qualcomm intends to implement their fast Krait cores, like those in the Snapdragon S4, only to the chips for the upper segment of the market. The company will incorporate Krait core designs only inside of their quad-core SoC chips for high-end mobile devices, while the cheaper Snapdragon will be for smartphones priced below $160 and will have a reference ARM core. This has been confirmed by James Shen, one of Qualcomm's managers.

Qualcomm subsidiary Qualcomm Atheros announced a new NFC chip labeled QCA1990 which is half the size of the current NFC chip and can supposedly work with an 8 times smaller antenna. According to Qualcomm's assessment, installation of this chip would be more cost effective than the installation of the current chips in use by smartphone manufacturers. They believe that the installation of QCA1990 into the lower tier smartphones would also be cost effective.

Sharp, who is in deep financial problems, could soon get a significant financial injection from the several companies, particularly Dell, Intel and Qualcomm. The three companies are holding talks with Sharp in about investing large amounts of cash into the company. Sharp has reportedly asked Dell and Intel for $240 million in exchange for shares in the company or as a debt. Qualcomm investments should probably be somewhat smaller.

In collaboration with Project Ray, a company that creates tools and instruments for those who cannot see well, Qualcomm has developed a smartphone based on Android that helps blind and visually impaired people to be rid of wearing several different devices simultaneously. This smartphone is made to replace voice readers, color readers, navigational instruments, special bar-code scanners, and MP3 players and it is driven by voice commands.

A few new high level S4 quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processors have been released for the mass market. The company already has their processors in some of the most popular smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC Windows Phone 8X, Nokia Lumia 820 and 920, Samsung ATIV S and Motorola Droid RAZR. Now they will push an upgraded version of their shining stars MSM8225 and MSM8625. They will bear the same names with just adding Q on the end. The next generation of Snapdragons will come in the first quarter of 2013.

The other day Microsoft decided to make an official announcement of the OEM partners that will be supporting Windows RT for the October 26th launch party. The list is pretty much what we described before and shows Lenovo, Asus, Dell and Samsung.  Acer, HP, Toshiba, Motorola, HTC and more will be passing on this (Motorola and HTC not by choice …). Of that list HP, Acer, and Toshiba will still work to release Intel based tablets running Windows 8 by the official launch date. The list has been dwindling since Steve Ballmer first made his proclamation that there would be 20+ tablets running Windows RT for the launch.

Rumors are fun things, but in the end a good deal of them can be counted out with little more than common sense (and a little research). An interesting rumor that popped up in the past weeks is one that is trying to claim that AMD is a prime target for acquisition. Right now the potential buyers are listed as Samsung and Qualcomm, but does any of that make sense? Is AMD really a prime target for acquisition and are they ready to be bought out by someone else? Let’s take a look at these rumors and see if they hold any water.a

ARM has released three new multi-core GPUs that are extremely flexible which ARM hopes will find their way into a wide range of mobile devices next year. New GPUs are the Mali T624, T628 and T678, built on the ARM Midgard graphic architecture. The new Mali GPUs are supposed to be the successors to the Mali 450-MP found in Samsung Galaxy S III, and if we can trust ARM they surpass that generation quite a bit. ARM claims they will offer a performance increase of aproximately 50% over the earlier Midgard generation T604 and T658. The new Mali GPU bring support for a graphics compression codec called ASTC (Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression), which  optimizes GPU performance and increases battery life.

Microsoft’s Windows 8 (both Windows RT and Windows 8 for x86-64) is due to hit the market around November of this year and it has already caused a ton of controversy. But there is one that did not get a ton of press when it was announced that highlights a few issues with Windows that many are not anticipating. Around the first of July it was announced that HP would not be making an ARM based tablet for the next OS and we also know that Acer will probably not as well.

Two days ago we wrote an article about how NPE (Non-Practicing Entities) are hurting the economy and small businesses. Our article was based on a report that was put together by the Boston University School of Law which showed that the use of NPEs in patent lawsuits cost $29 Billion in direct costs. Despite this many companies are moving to this model as a method of protection from patent lawsuits. We have seen Microsoft and Nokia do this and it seems that Qualcomm is splitting their business into two entities now too.