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Is Texas Instruments in Trouble? Qualcomm Just Snagged Samsung

TexasInstrumentsThere is no doubt that Qualcomm makes awesome hardware. Their old MSM line of processors are present in many major 3G and 2G devices that have been released in the past year. In the meanwhile, their 1 GHz Snapdragon processor has become the processor to have in a mobile phone. The upcoming Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 and a still unnamed Snapdragon device from LG are in the works -both are also coincidentally Android smart phones; a lot of people are eagerly anticipating these phones to arrive.

SNAPDRAGONQualcomm is also the preferred processor for HTC. These days, the Qualcomm brand gets called a lot when checking mobile phone specifications as you would usually find their process on most high end mobile phones.

Qualcomm does more than produce processors; as a developer and researcher of technological innovations, Qualcomm holds several patents for key mobile phone features. CDMA, which is basically a technology for making a single bandwidth signal hold several streams of data, is a very useful technology that will maximize data transfer speeds. Recently, Samsung has recently acquired rights to the Qualcomm patent on CDMA for 1.6 billion US Dollars.  Samsung will also pay Qualcomm royalties for the next 15 years.

Texas Instruments, another hardware developer; is well known for their Arm Cortex processors. While Qualcomm and Texas Instruments have never been direct competitors, they share the same market in the mobile phone industry. With Samsung already signed up with Qualcomm for the next decade and a half, it is likely that they would also be exclusively using Qualcomm processors.

This is good news, as Qualcomm’s hardware far surpasses that of TI’s. The great thing about technology is that in order to progress, there is no need for competition. Unlike other economies that require competition in order to improve services, innovate products and ultimately, lower prices; technological advancements rely more on a predictable evolutionary direction in which the most useful survives.

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  • Anonymous
    There are a lot of misinformation in this article. The author did a very bad job of investigating the true technical realities.
    -- The ARM Cortex processor is not from Texas instruments. It is from ARM. TI and other companies just license it. Have you ever heard of Palm Pre or the current Nokia N series using TI's OMAP based SoCs .
    -- The base band processor and the general processor in a mobile phones are normally separate. Even on iPhone there is an ARM Cortex from Samsung
  • Some guy in Colorado
    "The great thing about technology is that in order to progress, there is no need for competition." --
    WHAT??? That is completely wrong, if Qualcomm was the ONLY company doing cell phone hardware, do you think we would have iPhones and Blackberry's? The answer is no, we would not. Competition is everything, it is what makes technology more and more affordable every day. This is true in ANY market!!!
  • Larry
    Blog is a joke. It is open that Samsung is using TI processors in their latest smartphones such as the OMNIA HD. Qualcomm does not have a processor on the market today that can compete against the OMAP3430 from all the info and data on the web. Also, there are a lot of competition in the market about Samsung, Qualcomm, Intel, Marvell, etc. that talk about introducing their competitive apps processor products but not seeing any of them on the market yet. Meanwhile, TI appears to be in the latest phones such as Pre, Droid, etc. and as others enter the market, they will cost reduce quickly I am sure. As the phone become more and more complex, I think the stand alone apps process will be the preferred smartphone solution and the companies that continue to try to integrate modems, etc. will struggle to compete. Also, keep you eye on the "multi-tasking" capability- this is key and why the 3430 appears to have the market right now.
  • Bob
    "Unlike other economies that require competition in order to improve services, innovate products and ultimately, lower prices; technological advancements rely more on a predictable evolutionary direction in which the most useful survives."

    ..This is absurd
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