Hasta La Gadget!

This week the folks at Qualcomm have announced that their one and only developer conference Uplinq 2013 will this year be held between September 3rd and 5th, chock-full of mobile application and developer strategy goodness from start to finish. This event will once again be working with technical sessions, chats, demonstrations, and networking opportunities in massive amounts – and SlashGear will be there to cover the whole gamut! While registration isn’t quite open yet, it will be extremely soon for those interested in jumping in on the future of mobile computing from the Qualcomm side of the universe.

Uplinq is as Qualcomm claims it, “the wireless industry’s only cross-platform developer’s conference”, and it’s now been expanded to three full days. This set of events will be featuring here in 2013 a series of professionals from all angles – developers, manufacturers, operators, and technology providers alike. This set of events will show a cross-platform look at the wireless industry from not just a series of perspectives, but the specific perspectives you’ll find valuable to your business.

Qualcomm’s Uplinq series of events is made for “all members of the value chain”, as senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Qualcomm Anand Chandrasekher makes clear, and “Feedback from last year’s attendees has us adding more technical sessions and further enhancing the business development programs we will be offering at Uplinq 2013.” It’s basically going to be one big technology high-five for everyone who’s responsible for creating, delivering, or supporting the industry from top to bottom!

Have a peek at our Uplinq collection to see what we’ve seen in the past from Qualcomm’s premiere developer conference. This event has shown us everything from the tiniest in-device speaker amplifications to the largest previews of Qualcomm technologies for the future. Camera demonstrations with sword fighters, device previews from top manufacturers, and up close and personal action in the Snapdragon environment – hot stuff!

Qualcomm’s Uplinq 2013 set for September with maximum developer potential is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week it’s been made clear – or perhaps just clearer than ever before – that a company able to manufacture its own device components is a company that will thrive. According to the readouts from Gartner showing 2012′s top consumers in the semiconductor universe specifically, Samsung and Apple are out in front of the pack – by a significant margin. Semiconductors, mobile processors, and hardware from displays to memory cards are all a part of this puzzle, and as the two next entries on that list show with double-digit percentage drops show, it’s not just Apple and Samsung that are floating upward here coming into 2013, it’s mobile smart devices as a whole (and all their little bits and pieces).

Samsung is a company that has the ability to create each of the most vital bits, (like their Exynos processor for mobile devices), for each smartphone and tablet it puts on the market. They are the company that went through the most semiconductors in the market in the world in 2012, and they’re making these components themselves. While companies like LG and Lenovo create devices and need billions of dollars worth of semiconductors too, they need groups like Qualcomm and NVIDIA to manufacture those pieces of hardware for them.

So while Samsung is indeed made up of several different businesses, one that makes displays, another that makes processors, another that designs smartphones, it’s still the brand Samsung that profits from one part consuming products from another. So when you see Samsung at the top of the global semiconductor customers list in 2012, a big chunk of that change is being kept in the family. Meanwhile even the third place company HP must rely on groups like Intel in a large way for the architecture in their machines.

Groups like Qualcomm and NVIDIA rely on the companies that do not manufacture their own device innards, on the other hand, so it’s not as if there’s only one perfect model here created by these top companies with their own supplies. Qualcomm creates mobile modems that sit in a large cross-section of the smartphones you see on the market today, while NVIDIA’s Tegra line of processors all but dominated the first wave of Android tablets and Super Phones that came out across 2011.

You’ll find the Qualcomm Snapdragon line of processors coming out in some of the most popular smartphones over the past year, too, including none other than Samsung’s Galaxy S III. What we’re going to be seeing here through 2013 – and what we’ve begun to see already – is Samsung sticking with their own Exynos processor lineup as much as they can muster. Meanwhile groups like ViewSonic, Toshiba, and ASUS will continue to work with NVIDIA and HTC, LG, and Nokia will opt for Qualcomm. Of course those partnerships aren’t definitive by any means, and several of the companies have gone between Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments (now out of the mobile processor business), and others in the past.

There’s also a cross-over happening on the part of NVIDIA with their first production device by the name of Project SHIELD. This is a mobile gaming handheld that’s branded by NVIDIA and includes both the Tegra 4 processor and their own Icera modem. we’ll just have to wait and see who they worked with to create the rest of the components in the final build, but for now, the point is clear: it seems clear that creating your own device, top to bottom, is becoming more and more preferable by companies with the ability to work with such a process.

Samsung and Apple one-brand manufacturing puts competition on notice is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Intel has just launched a series of budget-friendly CPUs based on its Ivy Bridge microarchitecture. According to CPU World, Intel has launched a total of seven new additions to its Celeron and Pentium series. Intel’s Celeron family are welcoming three new chips – the G1610, G1610T, and the G1620. The G1610 and G1610T are clocked at 2.6GHz and 2.7GHz, respectively, while the G1620 is clocked at 2.3GHz. Pricing is set at $42, $42, and $52, respectively. Additionally, Intel also launched four Pentium processors, namely, the G2010, G2020, G2120T, and the G2130. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Report: Microsoft Looking To Invest $3 Billion In Dell, Amazon In-App Purchasing In PC, Mac And Browser Games,

Even more transfer news from chipmakers, although this one isn’t quite as litigious. AMD has hired two senior engineers with experience at both Qualcomm and Apple. The hires have been confirmed by AMD, which added that the new recruits would help the chipmaker expand into new markets — though the spokesperson didn’t specify what these markets would be. Charles Matar, with expertise in low-power and embedded chip design will join from Qualcomm as AMD’s new vice president of SoC Development, while Wayne Meretsky, formerly of Apple, was named vice president of software IP development. AMD still derives around 80 percent of its revenue from PCs, a market that continues to slow as smartphones and tablets continue to flourish. Both will likely be involved in the development of whatever AMD’s planning for after Temash.

Filed under: Misc, AMD

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Source: Reuters

ARM’s big.LITTLE is a processor technology that you are going to hear a lot about in 2013 as Samsung, Huawei and others promote their 8-core (octo-core) chips used in smartphones, tablets and possibly Chromebooks. There is no doubt that marketing teams will call those chips “8 cores” – because you know, 8 is better than 4, which is better than 2… But these chips aren’t 8-core in the way that most people think about 8-cores, which means 8 cores that work together on a computing task. Instead, big.LITTLE octo-core chips have two sets of four cores, some big, some small (hence the big.LITTLE name), that take turns to execute a task with the most efficient power envelope. Let’s take a closer look:

big.LITTLE overview

big.LITTLE comes from a simple observation: in order to make each processor core faster, they need to get bigger to host more execution units, instruction decoder, cache memory etc… But as chips get bigger, they invariably have more transistors and require more power to maintain or switch state. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Android Mind Blowing Numbers at Mobile Loco, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean: New features and apps,