US-based Qualcomm Inc, the world’s largest vendor of mobile-phone chips, stressed the significance of its chipset efficiency yesterday in response to rival MediaTek Inc’s (聯發科) recent launch of an octa-core chipset.
“I think the question for us is not about how many cores,” Qualcomm senior vice president Bill Davidson said during a conference call with Taiwanese media when asked to comment on MediaTek’s unveiling of an octa-core long-term evolution (LTE) chipset.
LTE is a standard for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals.
Davidson said the key factor for Qualcomm is that the company has been investing heavily in its own microarchitecture, for which Qualcomm has a “unique license” from British chip designer ARM Holdings PLC.
However, it is understandable that other chipmakers without their own microarchitecture design will have to add more cores to their products to support various capabilities, Davidson said.
“But we will be different, so we can do things more efficiently in fewer cores,” he said.
Qualcomm’s newest processors have remained quad core. It introduced its Snapdragon 805 LTE processor in November last year to deliver high-quality mobile video, imaging and graphics at ultra-HD 4K resolution.
In December last year, the company launched the Snapdragon 410, its first chipset with 64-bit features typically found in PCs, to target highly affordable 4G LTE smartphones at a sub-US$150 price point.
MediaTek responded on Feb. 11 by unveiling the world’s first 4G LTE octa-core smartphone chip, MT6595, which Morgan Stanley said could help the Taiwanese firm lay the groundwork for tapping into China’s 4G market and acquiring new customers in developed markets.
The MT6595 will be commercially available in the first half of this year, with end devices expected in the second half of the year, MediaTek said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to