Industry Expert Blogs

The last session of the day for Linley Mobile was about processors to go into smartphones. One surprise was that there is a core that nobody seems to have heard of since it is only really used in Taiwan up until now, and it is used in several Mediatek chips.

The most "glamorous" processor in a smartphone is the one in the application processor chip (or the one exposed to the apps in an integrated AP+BB chip). However there may be as many as 15 more processors in a smartphone inside things like the GPS, WiFi, power management. These processors are not automatically ARM since the code is purely internal to the chip and is not exposed to the user. It is hard for anyone to win an AP processor from ARM (although Intel is trying) since even on Android where apps are written in Java and is supposed to be portable, in reality many apps, especially games, contain ARM assembly.

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