Today’s flagship smartphones are using chips built by a variety of vendors. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus uses a Texas Instruments OMAP4460. HTC’s One X has an NVIDIA Tegra 3 in Europe and Asia, but a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 in America. The upcoming Galaxy S III will likely use a Samsung made Exynos chip. Apple designs their own chips, but Samsung is the one who actually makes them. And as for Nokia and their feature phones and Symbian devices, most of those run on STMicroelectronics hardware. All that information is relevant because we were shocked to discover a report issued by J.P. Morgan that says one out of every three smartphones sold by Samsung uses a Broadcom chip. Broadcom is a company we know for their WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS combo chips, but smartphones? Then we combed through our archives and realized that less than three months ago we wrote about the BCM21552G, which is a chip that combines a 1 GHz ARM11 processor, GPU, 3G radio, GPS, and NFC; said chip will end up in smartphones that cost no more than $100. And that’s when the lightbulb flickered on.
Chances are that if you’re reading this, you already have a smartphone. But what about everyone else? Lots of folks are going to be buying their first Android device this year, not because Android is better than iOS, but because today’s market conditions allow manufacturers to create decent $200 smartphones. It’s these volume devices that you’re going to be hearing about a lot over the next few months. To be frank, we don’t know why Samsung doesn’t just design their own low cost Exynos chip. Maybe it’s simply cheaper to buy parts from Broadcom? And what about Qualcomm, where’s their ultra low cost single core S4 Snapdragon for devices in the sub $200 range?
Cheap is going to be the new black.
[Via: Unwired View]