Spreadtrum is a Chinese company you’ve likely never heard of, yet they’re responsible for 50% of all the TD-SCDMA devices sold by China Mobile, which by the way has over 600 million subscribers. In other words, they’re big, just not well known outside of their home country. So what do they actually do? They’re quite similar to Qualcomm and NVIDIA in that they design chips, but they don’t actually make them; in industry lingo they’re a “fabless” company. Earlier this week Spreadtrum announced two new chips, the SC8810 and the … Read more

Imagination Technologies is a British company that designs graphics processors that they then license out for companies to put on their chips. Take Apple’s iPad 2 for instance. The “Apple A5″ chip inside the iPad 2 is actually made from a combination of intellectual property gathered from multiple vendors, most notably ARM, who makes the Cortex A9 application processor, and Imagination Technologies, who makes the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 graphics processor. Qualcomm is different. They do everything themselves. They license ARM’s architecture so that their chips can run code written for … Read more

Believe it or not, between 2002 and 2006 Intel made processors for mobile phones that used ARM’s architecture. The division responsible for all that amazing work was known as XScale. Intel sold XScale to Marvell during the summer of 2006, one year before Apple released the iPhone and redefined what a mobile phone was capable of. I bet Intel’s kicking themselves in the ass over that. Anyway, since then Intel has been trying to get someone, anyone, to build a smartphone that uses their x86 chips. In layman’s terms: they … Read more

One in four of the mobile phones shipped last quarter were smartphones. How does the wireless industry improve on that and eventually kill off the feature phone? Simple really, just make components cheaper. Today Qualcomm announced two new chips, the MSM8625 and MSM8225, that aim to make dual core processors a ubiquitous technology. They’re both clocked at 1 GHz, both have an Adreno 203 GPU, and both have an integrated 3G radio. These chips are also “designed to be hardware and software compatible with the MSM7x27A and MSM7x25A family of … Read more

Intel and Micron have just announced an industry first. Together they’ve created a 128 gigabit NAND chip made using a 20 nanometer process. What exactly does that mean? The memory technology used in smartphones, tablets, and solid state hard drives, and we’re talking about storage here, not random access memory or RAM, depends on NAND chips. Until today the largest NAND chip on the market could store just 64 gigabits of data, better known as 8 gigabytes. Manufactures typically stack NAND chips on top of each other to get additional … Read more