In mobile chip news this week, Qualcomm has unveiled its newest Snapdragon chipset, Broadcom has teamed up with Amazon, and Freescale has agreed to buy Mindspeed’s ARM processor business.
Qualcomm has made good on its promise to challenge Apple’s 64-bit processor with a high-end solution of its own. Following up on this winter’s announcement of the Snapdragon 410, 610, and 615 chips for mid-range mobile devices, Qualcomm has added 64-bit processing to it flagship line of mobile processors, the Snapdragon 800 series. 64-bit chips are most often seen in personal computers, but as smartphones and tablets become the primary computing devices for more and more people, chipsets are evolving.
From a connectivity standpoint, Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 808 and 810 integrate the company’s Cat 6 LTE Advanced multimode modem together and support is RF360 front end Solution. The Snapdragon chipsets also support 3x20MHz carrier aggregation, enabling speeds of up to 300 Mbps. They also incorporate Qualcomm’s just-announced multi-user MIMO connectivity for faster, more efficient Wi-Fi connections.
“The Snapdragon 810 is undoubtedly the most advanced and highest-performance smartphone processor yet announced,” said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. “It delivers all of the key features needed for flagship phones in 2015, including 64-bit CPUs, leading CPU performance, leading GPU performance, 4K video, advanced camera features, and state-of-the-art LTE modem, all integrated on one chip. But Qualcomm’s early announcement gives competitors time to respond. For example, we do not have any details on Nvidia’s Tegra K1-64, which could challenge the Snapdragon 810 in CPU and graphics performance.”
Amazon gets fresh with Broadcom
Grocery shopping may be Amazon’s freshest idea to date, and its mobile device that makes grocery lists is powered by Broadcom’s WICED (Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices). WICED enables Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity for home appliances, health and fitness equipment, digital cameras, toys and games.
Amazon Dash (pictured) is a 6-inch by 1-inch device that acts as both a voice recorder and a scanner, and connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi. Users can tell Dash what groceries they need to buy, or scan the empty containers of items they have run out of. Dash tries to find the items on Amazon. Using a mobile app, users can check their Amazon Fresh accounts on a smartphone, tablet or laptop, view the shopping list they’ve built on the go, and then checkout and schedule delivery.
Freescale to buy Mindspeed unit
After selling Mindspeed’s small cell assets to Intel, MACOM is now selling its ARM processor unit to Freescale for an undisclosed amount.
Mindspeed’s Comcerto communications processor unit targets wireless access points with its embedded processors, and offers solutions for products that serve enterprises, small businesses, and home users. The company’s flagship is the Comcerto 2000 SoC, which combines two 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs with packet engines and communications accelerators.
“There were some attractive products and some nice design wins but it was never an obvious fit for Mindspeed, who were primarily doing infrastructure,” said former Mindspeed executive Rupert Baines. “That said, you can see how it could fit with Freescale, especially with their plans in consumer and their adoption of ARM.”
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