Last September we heard rumors that NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Fujitsu, NEC, and Panasonic were going to get together to try and take on Qualcomm. The news became official a few months later in December. Here we are, barely at the start of the second quarter of the year, and they’ve decided to call it quits. It’s a shame really, because Qualcomm needs some strong competition in order to keep prices in check and to guarantee that innovation doesn’t stagnate. So what does Qualcomm do so well anyway, what do they do that’s so hard to replicate? Back in 2009, these guys had the insight to put everything needed to create a smartphone into a single easy to sell platform. You’ve probably heard of it, it’s called Snapdragon. Whereas before handset vendors had to source a separate application processor, separate graphics processor, separate cellular modem, separate WiFi chip, and so on and so forth, Qualcomm just slapped all that into Snapdragon and made people’s lives a hell of a lot easier.
Other companies have definitely been trying to catch up, most notably ST-Ericsson. That company was formed several years ago as a joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Ericsson. Their latest creation combines two ARM Cortex A9 processors, an advanced PowerVR SGX 544 GPU, and a 4G LTE modem, and best of all it’s built on a 28 nanometer process. The problem? Said chip isn’t going to be sampling until the second half of this year, and it’s likely not going to come out until the first half of 2013.
So who is best positioned to actually defeat Qualcomm this year, or at least take some market share away from them? Samsung and NVIDIA. Rumor has it that Samsung’s next processor, the one that’ll be at the heart of the Galaxy S III, will have a built-in modem; and NVIDIA has already announced that they’re going to slap some 4G LTE inside their Tegra chips sooner rather than later.
Watch this space.