In what is likely one of the biggest stories in tech for the week, Arm Holdings, a company that only recently returned to being a public company in September, saw a huge spike in its stock, nearly 60% at one point, after its quarterly earnings report. As recently as Halloween Arm was under $50, yet broke $120 on Thursday.
Read MoreThe heart of this new device is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, first announced at the company’s Snapdragon Summit back in late October. This SoC has 8 CPU cores (one Arm Cortex-X4, five Cortex-A720, two Cortex-A520) that the company claims offers 30% better performance over the previous gen, an updated Adreno GPU that is 25% faster, and maybe you’ve heard of this thing called AI? The integrated Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) is more than 40% faster than last year’s model thanks to hardware and drastic software improvements from the engineering team.
Read MoreNew road maps released this week from Arm detail the future of the company’s processor designs and show a shift in emphasis towards higher performance.
Read MoreThe future of the notebook PC lies in merging the familiarity of Windows with experiences and capabilities that are unique to smartphones. This should include a renewed emphasis on battery life, targeting days rather than hours of real-world usage. Deep sleep and hibernate states that force portions of the system to be inaccessible for dynamic updating and that slow the ability for the user to interact with PC should be eliminated. Ubiquitous internet access through high speed, Gigabit-class LTE can provide uninterrupted data support without the hassle and reliability concerns of Wi-Fi and comes with a connected standby experience where your data is ready when you need it.
Read MoreThough founded in 1987 and rising to as high as 83rd in the Fortune 500 list, Huawei remains an enigma to many investors and consumers in the US. It has grown to become the world’s third largest smartphone vendor behind only Samsung and Apple. (In Q3 of 2017 Huawei surpassed Apple to be #2 on that list.) Huawei doesn’t come by this success easily though as it spent more than $14B on research and development in 2017.
Read MoreWith the reveal of its next flagship phone at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, Samsung continues to be a driving force in the smart phone market with innovation and features unmatched in the Android space and as the primary competitor to Apple in the high-end of the market. The new Galaxy S9 and S9+ offer improvements to the camera system, a faster processor developed by Qualcomm, and a new set of color options.
Read MoreWhether agreed to and approved through regulatory bodies or not, the current situation surrounding Broadcom attempting to purchase Qualcomm is creating instability in the market’s move to 5G cellular technology. This disruption will be substantially increased if a deal is agreed to or if the board of directors at Qualcomm is replaced, as the current Broadcom takeover plan calls for. During a sensitive time of transition like the one the mobile market finds itself, uncertainty and confusion about the leader in 5G technology could have a waterfall effect on the market.
Read MoreWith significant pressure to show the value and growth opportunities for the company with a looming hostile takeover bid from Broadcom, mobile chip design house Qualcomm is hoping that its position in the market of next-generation cellular radio technology will be a foundation of its future. The company revealed today partnerships with 18 global OEMs that will be launching 5G-ready devices in 2019 and 18 worldwide cellular carriers will be completing tests of Qualcomm 5G radios in 2018.
Read MoreLost in the shuffle of earnings releases last week was an announcement between Samsung and Qualcomm that the San Diego chip vendor hopes could have significant impact on its current battle with Apple and other vendors regarding licensing disputes. In a subtle, but potentially impactful agreement extension between it and Samsung, Qualcomm believes that it will be able to lay to rest the combative legal dispute with the Cupertino iPhone maker and bring along with it a boost in revenue through back-pay and future royalties.
Read MoreFor years consumers have complained and theorized that Apple would purposely degrade the performance of older models of iPhones as newer models were released, pushing and encouraging consumers to accelerate their upgrade cycle for devices. Concerns were mostly based on a phone “feeling slower” and there was little evidence that Apple was or would be willing to decrease the performance of older devices intentionally. Knowledgeable media and analysts typically chocked it up to new versions of iOS (the operating system software for iPhones) targeting newer hardware and processors with less time for optimization by Apple engineers for older model phones.
Read MoreQualcomm has found itself in another important battle over the last few weeks. Rather than a legal dispute with Apple, this fight comes from a potential takeover and buyout by tech-giant Broadcom. Broadcom already made one official offer to shareholders for the company, totaling around $103B, but it was unanimously rejected by Qualcomm’s board.
Read MoreIntel this week made announcements surrounding its efforts and products in the mobile connectivity device segment. The Intel XMM 8000-series of 5G capable modems will bring the next-generation of wireless connectivity to PCs, smartphones, and infrastructure devices with a target consumer product launch in mid-2019. Intel also updated plans for a new 4G LTE modem that will offer speeds as high as 1.6 Gigabits-per-second, a substantial upgrade from current connectivity options on smartphones (peaking at 1.0 Gigabits-per-second), again with a 2019 target release.
Read MoreThe new display processor is highly associated with the latest Mali GPU cores, but with enough work a 3rd party licensee could adapt it to another GPU architecture. This is obviously not the most efficient way of using this technology as it is regarded as a turnkey solution for the Mali GPU products. ARM has developed the software stack for both Andriod and Linux, and if needed it can develop Windows based drivers to fully leverage the features of this latest product. It is easily attached to 3rd party panel interfaces.
Read MoreAs the winter buying seasons ramps up, AMD is readying a major notebook processor release that will be competitive to for the first time Intel in nearly a decade. With recent leaks of upcoming configurations coming from major system builders like HP, and performance data that indicates a strong uplift compared to previous AMD offerings, the mobile AMD chip will force both Intel and NVIDIA to make adjustments to product lines and positioning.
Read MoreApple announced the new iPhone 8 and iPhone X yesterday and the majority of the discussion will center around the high prices of the flagship models, the design and integration of the edge to edge screen, and remaining concerns about availability of the $999 version. But this generation of iPhone also brings with it a significant shift in the silicon design that powers Apple’s smartphones. With both the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X, the company is using in-house designed processors nearly exclusively.
Read MoreToday however, the Apple that sells phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, software, and services often times takes a back seat to competitors when it comes to hardware integration. When a company has the market share and audience of this scope it can be difficult to make sweeping changes in as it risks alienating a subset of consumers. The side effect is a product line that is further behind competing solutions than ever before.
Read MoreQualcomm has put forward steady work on creating the vibrant hardware ecosystem for mobile VR to facilitate broad adoption of wireless, dedicated head mounted displays. Though the value of Samsung’s Gear VR and Google’s Daydream View cannot but overstated in moving the perception of consumer VR forward, the need to utilize your smart phone in a slot-in style design has its limitations. It consumes battery that you may require for other purposes, it limits the kinds of sensors that the VR system can utilize, and creates a sub-optimal form factor in order to allow for simple user installation.
Read MoreWith both Microsoft and Qualcomm publicly discussing the re-emergence of mobile processors from Qualcomm running the Windows consumer desktop operating system, it seems as good a time as any to dissect what this might mean for the industry and the major players involved. Windows 10 running on Qualcomm processor platforms in tablets and notebook form factors brings with it some incredible opportunities for all involved, including the consumers they are targeting, with a focus on areas the Windows+Intel relationship has neglected for some time. But with that comes substantial risk and many avenues of potential conflict when these systems begin to hit the market the end of this year.
Read MoreBringing Android apps and the Play Store to the Chromebook platform is not a trivial task. Android applications were built and compiled for a specific set of hardware and operating system variants. Chrome OS, despite being designed by the same company, is quite different. It was built initially as an online-only system and has slowly evolved into a hybrid, acknowledging and accepting the need for offline activities. In the Chromebook space today there are two distinct segments of hardware available: one is based on ARM-designed processors and the other uses Intel x86 processors.
Read MoreThe topic of honesty in the world of mobile performance benchmarks can draw pursed lips and awkward glances when brought up in a meeting involving a silicon SoC provider. It’s not a secret that gaming the system has been a frequent area of concern since phone reviews became an intrinsic part of the purchasing process for many consumers, but it isn’t a popular subject. Some of the most-respected in media showed back in 2013 that nearly everyone involved in the process had some portion of blame, resulting in dishonest scores and performance metrics that led to ill-informed customers.
A similar, but more nuanced, discussion can be had about SoC and handset performance over time. Thiscan take two angles: first, performance of benchmarks in long-term usage scenarios (sustained performance); and second, performance of phones through software and firmware updates released weeks, months, and even years later.
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