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Intel’s industry position and prospects for years ahead
Follow-up: Intel: accelerated Atom SoC roadmap down to 22nm in 2 years and a “new netbook experience” for tablet/mobile PC market [April 17, 2011]
Update: Intel executive quits as smartphone biz falters [March 21, 2011]: (emphasis is mine)
The Intel executive who led Intel’s so-far-unsuccessful push into smartphones and tablets quit as that business comes under unrelenting competitive pressure from companies like Apple, Qualcomm, and Nvidia.
Anand Chandrasekher, who had been senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group, announced today that he will be leaving Intel to “pursue other interests”.
…
Chandrasekher had become somewhat infamous for making regular appearances at Intel conferences over the last few years and invariably waving a prototype smartphone or handheld device for the cameras, then promising that an Intel-based smartphone was on the way. But none ever materialized.
“The industry has gone right past them,” said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw. “They’re just another player [in the smartphone and tablet markets]. There’s no first among equals,” Kumar said, referring to the ARM processor business, which is dominated by an oligarchy of other big chip companies, including Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung, Apple, Marvell, and Nvidia.
Another analyst says that Intel’s first chip designed specifically for tablets and smartphones, “Moorestown,” was a failure. “Moorestown was a complete flop,” said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group, a chip consulting firm. “Intel is still struggling to get traction in tablets and particularly smartphones. Atom is in a few tablets that run Windows, but Windows tablets are not very popular, except in a few vertical applications,” he said.
Note: Although Chandrasekher bet his corporate carrier on this in 2006 when Intel sold its XScale business to Marvell, there were a number of higher placed Intel executives who were much more responsible for this major strategic mistake: (emphasis is mine)
“As part of the thorough analysis of Intel begun in April, we have examined the focus and structure of our top management level, including our use of ‘two-in-a-box’ co-managers,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini. … Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group will be led by Executive Vice President Sean Maloney, 50, who previously co-managed the company’s Mobility Group. Maloney will also become Intel’s chief sales and marketing officer. … Senior Vice President David Perlmutter, 53, will continue as general manager of the Mobility Group. Senior Vice President Anand Chandrasekher, 43, formerly co-general manager of the Sales and Marketing Group, will manage a newly created business unit focused on low power Intel Architecture products and the ultra-mobile PC market. He will report to Perlmutter. … Intel Announces Management Changes [July 20, 2006]
Marvell Technology Group, Ltd. and Intel Corporation today announced that they have signed an agreement for Intel to sell its communications and application processor business to Marvell for a purchase price of $600 million plus the assumption by Marvell of certain liabilities. The planned sale will give Marvell a strong presence in the growing market segment for processors used in smart handheld devices. The sale also will enable Intel to focus its investments on its core businesses, including high-performance, low-power Intel Architecture-based processors and emerging technologies for mobile computing, including Wi-Fi and WiMAX broadband wireless technologies. … “In recent years, Intel has made significant progress and won major customers with this business,” said Sean Maloney, Intel executive vice president and general manager, Mobility Group. … Marvell To Purchase Intel’s Communications And Application Processor Business For $600 Million [June 27, 2006]
Intel probably has good business reasons for selling the 1,400-person communications/applications XScale unit to Marvell. Faced with a surprisingly resurgent AMD and other challenges, Intel is rapidly cutting costs and reorganizing. XScale’s financial performance was lackluster, so the unit was an obvious candidate for a selloff. And Marvell is paying $600 million in cash, which isn’t chump change, even for Intel.
Another reason for Intel to reduce its commitment to XScale is that it’s not an Intel-native CPU architecture. XScale isn’t protected by the same financial and emotional capital that Intel has invested in, say, the IA-64 (Itanium) architecture. Indeed, XScale is ARM compatible, so every design win strengthens ARM.
As we see it, Intel now has three options: create an entirely new embedded-processor architecture; acquire another embedded-processor architecture from an outside company; or renew its commitment to developing the x86 as an embedded architecture.
Creating a new architecture is the least likely option. The world already has plenty of CPU architectures, and MPR covers new ones all the time. We don’t think Intel will embark on an expensive, risky project that could turn into another i432, i960, or IA-64.
Acquiring an outside CPU architecture is only slightly more likely than creating one from scratch. …
Intel’s third option is to develop new, low-power x86 embedded processors. Yes, we know, Intel is already doing that. Two weeks ago, Intel announced that Senior Vice President Anand Chandrasekher will manage a new business unit focused on the ultramobile PC (UMPC) and low-power x86 products. The new unit will almost certainly use technology developed by Intel’s Low Power on Intel Architecture research project at the System Technology Labs (www.intel.com/technology/systems/lpia/). But Intel needs to step up the pace of this project and send clearer signals about its embedded x86 strategy.
Recall that a year ago, Intel CEO Paul Otellini promised to deliver by 2010 a 500mW x86 processor capable of running an operating system like Microsoft’s Vista, the next version of Windows. Otellini’s goal is to bring desktop performance to PDA-size UMPCs. Achieving that goal would be an impressive feat. But by 2010, cellphones with ARM processors might subsume the functions that Otellini envisions for x86-based UMPCs. Future derivatives of Apple’s ARM-based iPods are another source of potential competition. Even the XScale-based Blackberry communicators that Intel has discarded might evolve into versatile palmtop computers.
… Intel’s Embedded Future [Microprocessor Report, July 31, 2006]
BACK TO THE ORIGINAL NEWS:
It went around the major on-line ICT publishers that Intel loses 2010 chip market share while Samsung gains, says Gartner while the source is stressing an overall finding that Gartner Says Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue Increased 31.5 Percent in 2010 to Exceed $300 Billion [Dec 8], and regarding Intel it rather made an internal remark:
Intel held the No. 1 vendor position for the 19th consecutive year in 2010, albeit with a slightly smaller share of the market, down to an estimated 13.8 percent from 14.2 percent in 2009 (see Table 1). Intel saw strong growth in the first half of the year as the PC market stocked up inventory in anticipation of a strong second half of the year, but third quarter growth weakened as consumer sentiment began to flag. Sales of mini-notebooks — a segment for which Intel is almost the exclusive supplier — were particularly disappointing.
Worth to read along with this: Gartner: media tablets are the new segment next to mobile PCs and desktops, as well as web- and app-capable mobile phones [April 16, 2011]
Instead of the referred in Gartner’s “Worldwide semiconductor revenue” press release table I am including here the same data but in diagram format:
Whatever it is Intel is not worried at all. Intel’s own Free Press reported from the same day Barclays Capital event in San Francisco Intel CEO defends PC amid tablet, smartphone growth [Dec 8]. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan sent his report as Intel’s Otellini: The PC ‘just doesn’t die’ [Dec 8] with the following quotes:
I think it’s easy to forget about how important notebooks are, in particular, to people’s lives, and while there is a news flash the iPad is really fun, it’s not the only device that’s out there, and in fact, if you look at it on a scale of units, PCs are at 1 million units a day this year. Compare that to, what, 4 million iPads last quarter. Pick your own number for this quarter. So, it’s a vastly different scale here.
When talking about the upcoming next generation of Sandy Bridge processors where graphics are integrated into the chip. Regarding Intel’s tablet strategy the saying was:
Tablets, the thing that’s on everybody’s lips and minds. Our strategy here is very simple. We are going to offer best-of-class hardware around our Atom system on chips, and we are going to make sure that we support all of the viable operating systems that we — that want to work with us that are in the marketplace.
So I’ve just listed here some of the 35 design wins we have in tablets. A number of them on Windows. A number of them on Android. And this is both Froyo, and then Honeycomb as it comes out. Then, of course, on MeeGo, the operating system that we’re working on along with Nokia and other companies. Some of these are in the market today. You can buy — the ones that are Intel-based that are in the market today are typically from people like AT&T or Cisco, and they’re aimed at enterprise-class machines and customers. The consumer products will roll out over the first half of next year. You’ll start seeing them on all three operating systems. Probably at CES, you’ll see lots of demos, lots of announcements, and we’re pretty excited about this product line.
Updates:
Mobile doubts weigh on chipmakers Intel, AMD [Jan 14]
Despite better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings and guidance posted on Thursday, and a broadly higher market, its [Intel’s] shares slipped as investors focused on the company’s failure to stake out territory in the mobile market.
Even as Intel’s stock fell, shares of other semiconductor companies rose, with ARM rising 6.5 percent to a 10-year high.
The stock market, and sentiment on the wider technology industry, for years moved in tandem with Intel following its earnings report. But in recent quarters they have diverged.
“It’s historically been the bellwether, that if you’re positive on the (technology) sector you’re positive on Intel, but I think that relationship is breaking down,” said Craig Berger, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets.
Intel 4Q a window into industry’s inflection point [Jan 14] (emphasis is mine)
Some 350 million PCs were shipped in 2010, according to data released this week, and Intel CEO Paul Otellini says that more than 1 million PCs are now being sold every day.
…
Net income was $3.39 billion, or 59 cents per share, higher than the 53 cents per share analysts polled by FactSet were expecting. In the same period in 2009, Intel earned $2.28 billion, or 40 cents per share.
The year-ago figures would have been higher were it not for Intel’s $1.25 billion payment to rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to settle claims that Intel abused its market dominance to bully computer makers into avoiding AMD’s chips — charges Intel has long denied. Intel’s chips are inside 80 percent of the world’s PCs. Earlier this week, AMD ousted its CEO over the company’s growth prospects.
Intel’s revenue rose 8 percent to $11.5 billion, up from $10.6 billion last year. Analysts had forecast $11.4 billion.
For the first quarter, Intel expects revenue of $11.1 billion to $11.9 billion, ahead of analysts’ expectation for $10.8 billion.
And Otellini predicted that Intel’s revenue would rise 10 percent in 2011 — which translates to about $48 billion, up from $43.6 billion in 2010 and higher than the $45.5 billion analysts expected.
What saved Intel’s fourth quarter was strong corporate spending.
Companies, many of which froze their technology budgets during the Great Recession, are buying new servers for their data centers and PCs for their workers as their business prospects have brightened.
Operating profit in the Intel division that sells server chips jumped 47 percent to $1.43 billion, while the division that makes desktop and laptop chips grew at a slower rate, up 8 percent to $3.62 billion.
Server chips tend to carry higher profit margins than chips for PCs. The PC industry in general struggles with increasing commoditization, which lowers PC prices and benefits consumers, but erodes profits.
Although Intel’s results were strong compared with the previous year, revenue in each of its major divisions, except for server chips, was flat from the third quarter.
That showed the strain that emerged toward the end of the year, from economic problems such as prolonged unemployment and the European debt crisis, and competition from Apple Inc.’s iPad.
Sean Maloney resumes work at Intel [Jan 14] (emphasis is mine)
… earlier this month and is responsible for the chip giant’s tablet and handset solution business, according to industry sources.
As Maloney has been working closely with partners of the PC production chain in Taiwan, the resumption of work will help push the development momentum of tablet and handset solutions at Intel, the sources asserted.
…
Maloney has made some modifications to Intel’s product roadmap and marketing strategies for the two segments, and will solicit ODM and OEM partners such as Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics and Pegatron Technology to support Intel’s Oak Trail and Cedar Trail-M platforms.
Maloney will also step up cooperation with handset makers eyeing to re-enter the handset segment, the sources added.
Notebook vendors show no interest in Oak Trail [Jan 13, 2011] (emphasis is mine)
Because Acer and Asustek Computer have both shown their unwillingness to launch Oak Trail-based tablet PCs, Intel has recently been aggressively trying to persuade these vendors with price discounts and is hoping Asustek and Hewlett-Packard (HP), which are still undecided, will change their minds and fully support the platform, according to sources from notebook players.
Since Oak Trail has only been adopted by Fujitsu, Toshiba and Samsung Electronics for their tablet PCs and these vendors are not showing an aggressive attitude to mass produce models, while HP, which originally planned to launch an Oak Trail-based tablet PC, also stepped back and is reevaluating its plans, Intel is offering Oak Trail at a price point of around US$40, about the same as Nvidia’s Tegra 2, and the company will even give a further discount for large volume orders, the sources noted.
However, because Oak Trail is unable to out-perform Tegra 2, while Intel is already set to launch its new Cedar Trail-M platform for tablet PCs/netbooks in September 2011, most of the notebook vendors are unwilling to accept Intel’s offer and would rather wait until Intel releases its new platform before placing any orders, the sources added.
Intel’s response has been the same as on the December 2010 Ottelini presentation: Over 35 Oak Trail-based netbooks will show up in 1H11, says Intel [Jan 13, 2011]
End of updates
Here Ottelini had the following slide in his presentation:
Here the notable things are:
– HP and Acer, the #1 and #3 players on the notebook market are missing from the Windows part. We know however that Acer will play in Windows tablet space, albeit not with Intel but with AMD as has been noted in my Intel Oak Trail to beat ARM with MeeGo specific prices [Nov 25] post already.
– Update: MSI is also missing which is remarkable only because of a 4 days later MSI to reintroduce WindPad tablets at CES, claims Oak Trail improves performance and battery life [Dec 13] news (emphasis is mine):
According to MSI’s Director of North American Sales Andy Tung, Intel’s tablet solution does show both battery life and performance improvements over the current Atom chips, but it’s “not extremely significant.” Based on our discussion with Tung, we got the feeling that it’s a step in the right direction for Atom but still not as long-lasting as it needs to be to compete with ARM-based tablets.
For more detailed investigation of this news see: Oak Trail bringing only minor power savings to Windows tablets? [Dec 13].
– Acer is indicated in the MeeGo tablet space which is something new and also showing that the primary line of tablet market attack for Acer is the Android platform. Again consistent with the same post (with two Android tablets coming from Acer in February), also in the sense that Intel’s intent is to apply a MeeGo specific, very pricing for the Oak Trail type Atom.
– Nokia is missing from the MeeGo design wins which is again consistent with information in the same post that “The first MeeGo smartphone requires MeeGo V1.2 and won’t happen, either on Intel or ARM until around June 2011.” The only difference is that now the same statement applies to the 2011 Nokia tablet space as well.
Overall it is not so rosy outlook for Intel’s 2011 plans for tablets. Even more so since in the smartphone space Intel is even more behind of the market. No wonder why Financial Times was reporting from the Barclay’s Capital event as Intel inside 35 tablets, no phone till H2 2011 [Dec 8]:
Mr Otellini said the phone game represented a marathon not a sprint for Intel. It was tackling issues of certification, modem integration and the telecoms software stack. Its smartphone processor codenamed Medfield was currently being debugged for shipment in 2011 and 2012, he added.
Medfield is the successor to the Moorestown chip, launched in May, which still does not match the low-power capabilities of Arm-based phone processors and has not appeared in any smartphones this year, despite Intel’s high hopes expressed at the CES show in January.
So marketwise Intel’s major worry is the tablet market now as was noted by New York Times: Intel Girds For Netbook and Tablet Wars [Dec 8] when reporting:
The chip giant has created a new business unit that it calls the netbook and tablet group. The unit will be run by Douglas L. Davis, the current head of Intel’s embedded and communications group, who will be charged with making sure Intel can fend off all kinds of competition in the burgeoning market for PC offshoots.
Intel often formally announces the formation of such groups, but kept this one quiet. Bill Kircos, a company spokesman, confirmed the move.
“Netbook shipments will be heading north of 100 million, and we’ll all soon will find out what kind of market potential there is for tablets and these increasingly popular hybrid designs,” Mr. Kircos said. “It makes sense for us to sharpen our focus on these friends of the PC, and Doug’s experience running a similar and very successful embedded division makes him the right guy to lead the group.”
Ottelini himself said according to the above ZDNet report:
I don’t think, at the end of the day, tablets are cannibalizing it. They are not replacements for notebooks. They are a competitor for discretionary income disposition. So you walk into Best Buy and you’ve got $400 burning a hole in your pocket, or in the case of the iPad, $600 burning a hole in your pocket, and you want to buy something cool for Christmas for your wife or kid or something. It’s a competitor.
On the other hand, I have not seen a kid that takes the iPad to school and not a laptop. The laptop is still the fundamental tool in school. So, I don’t see it being a displacement. I see it being an extra-fun device that you use to consume content, for the most part. And I think it’s additive to the industry. So, if it goes to 50 million or 100 million units a year against a base of PCs that are 500 million units, that’s great. And we’ll have our fair share of those.
But on the Barclay’s Capital event his major point about the future of the market was expressed on following two slides:
So while in the year 2011 Intel will play a catch up game in the tablet space and just trying the waters in the smartphone market in the years which are coming after that the company sees as quite promising because of its huge manufacturing technology lead and its learnings from the previous critical periods of its growth when Intel was able become dominant player via its architecture.
More information:
– Intel says tablets and phones on the way in 2011 [Reuters, Dec 8]
Marvell beaten by Chinese chipmakers in sub 1,000 yuan handset procurement tender of China Mobile
Follow-up: First real chances for Marvell on the tablet and smartphone fronts [Aug 21 – Sept 25, 2011]
No international vendors win China Mobile procurement bid for 6 million TD-SCDMA CMMB handsets, says report [Nov 15, 2010]:
China Mobile will procure 12 models of inexpensive TD-SCDMA CMMB handsets, with an equal procurement volume of 500,000 units for each model, the report indicated. The seven local suppliers are ZTE with three models, Huawei Device, Lenovo and Coolpad each with two models as well as K-Touch, Hisense and New Postcom each with one model.
Vendors, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung Electronics, all failed in the competition because China Mobile asked for a unit procurement price of below 1,000 yuan (US$150) and they do not offer such inexpensive TD-SCDMA handset models, the report pointed out. Consequently, the seven China-based vendors eat the whole pie, with prices ranging from 350 yuan [US$52.7] to 650 [US$97.8] yuan.
Seven of the 12 models will use TD-SCDMA chips developed by China-based Leadcore Technology, a member of Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Group, and five models will be equipped with chips developed by China-based Spreadcom [Spreadtrum] Communications and T3G (originally China-based but has merged into ST-Ericsson).
Details on the model number, TD-SCDMA chipset vendor, and CMMB chip vendor for each handset are as follows (source Marbridge Daily):
Earlier reports about the tender announcement were:
– China Mobile to procure 6 million TD-SCMA handsets, says Chinese media [Oct 8, 2010]: “Of the total, 3.6 million will be of entry-level models and 2.4 million mid-range products. … the latest procurement effort is largely due to the fourth phase of the China Mobile’s TD-SCMA network construction. When completed, demand for TD-SCMA end-use products is expected to increase substantially.”
– China market: Inexpensive TD-SCDMA handsets to be available in 4Q10 [Oct 13, 2010]: “Pushed by China Mobile, TD-SCDMA handsets and smartphones at retail prices of about 500 yuan (US$75) and 1,000 yuan respectively will be available in the China market in the fourth quarter of 2010. … China Mobile is setting up its fourth-phase TD-SCDMA network of more than 100,000 base stations and expects the number of TD-SCDMA subscribers to increase from 13.42 million currently to 100 million in 2012.”
Please note the globally rock-bottom nature of 350 yuan [US$52.7] for entry-level models and of 650 [US$97.8] yuan mid-range products. No wonder that such a low-cost and high-performance system-on-a-chip (SoC) leader as Marvell Technology Group Ltd. had no chance to succeed through any of its handset manufacturing partners. Despite of its long stated aim to capitalize on huge volumes made possible by the sub 1,000 yuan TD-SCDMA handsets:
– Marvell Empowers Mass Market TD-SCDMA OPhones with PXA920 Chipset [Sept 8, 2009]:
The Marvell PXA920 [which later has obtained the additional name Pantheon 920] comes with a dedicated high performance ARM instruction set compliant Sheeva™ processor and an integrated release 7 (TD-SCDMA, TD-HSDPA, TD-HSUPA) TD-SCDMA baseband [processor] as well as a China Mobile proven EDGE modem.
“China Mobile Research Institute believes that the OPhone platform operating on the Marvell PXA920 will catalyze the hyper-growth of TD-SCDMA smartphones as it provides a powerful combination of value-added services on a feature rich, high performance and highly affordable platform. We believe that the PXA920 solution will help us realize China Mobile’s vision of sub-1000 RMB [sub $146] TD OPhones in the near future,” said Bill Huang general manager of China Mobile Research Institute. “Marvell has worked with us from the start of the PXA920 program [2 years ago] and we are excited by the rapid progress we have made towards realizing this milestone. China Mobile will work closely with Marvell and handset eco-system partners to deploy the PXA920 and we look forward to the rapid launch of next generation TD-SCDMA OPhones based on the Marvell PXA920.”
“It is an especially proud moment for me to work with China Mobile on the mass market launch of TD-SCDMA OPhones in China,” said Shanghai-born, Weili Dai, Marvell co-founder and vice president and general manager of the company’s Consumer and Computing Business Group. “Marvell’s mission is to make technology more useful and more affordable to more of the world’s consumers. The PXA920 realizes a shared vision of China Mobile and Marvell to make powerful and affordable smartphones accessible to everyone. With the first single chip solution for TD-SCDMA, Marvell is raising the technology bar for the entire industry.
– Marvell’s Vision and Long Term Commitment to China Positions Company for Next Phase of Growth [Sept 7, 2009]:
Marvell, with approximately $3 billion in revenues in fiscal year 2009, has nearly 700 employees in its Shanghai campus and is aggressively planning to expand its operations in China. The company has focused on building its presence in the China market for most of its 14 year history, initially developing strong relationships with enterprise customers like Huawei and ZTE.
…
Last week, Marvell celebrated the culmination of several years of investment in the China smartphone market with the introduction of the Marvell® PXA920, the first commercially available single-chip solution, enabling mass market availability of TD-SCDMA smartphones. Developed by Marvell’s research and development center in Shanghai, the PXA920 is a high performance, super integrated chipset that makes the new smartphones far more affordable than feature phones currently offered by China Mobile while providing enhanced performance versus current smartphones.
Update: That opportunity was realized only 2 years later. See:First real chances for Marvell on the tablet and smartphone fronts [Aug 21, 2011]
– Marvell Technology Group CEO Sehat Sutardja on Bloomberg [Sept, 2009]:
Our strategy is to focus:
- Focus on high-end smartphones
- Move smartphones to mainstream cell/feature-phone price range
- Work with China Mobile [world’s largest mobile company] for TD-SCDMA
– Marvell Drives $99 Smartphones to Market With New Pantheon Platform [Feb 12, 2010]
– Marvell Affirms Significant Progress in TD-SCDMA Mobile Phone Chipset at Mobile World Congress 2010 – Company Showcases Array of New Smartphones Developed for the China Market Powered by Marvell’s Low Cost, High Performance Processors [Feb 15, 2010]:
More than 90 percent of all OPhones (EDGE and TD-SCDMA) shipped since launch last September are built on Marvell’s power efficient, high performance silicon technology.
In addition to OPhones, Marvell recently announced new breakthrough developments in cellular silicon technology with the new Pantheon(TM) communication processors which enable development of sleeker, high performance smartphones with HD-quality, live instant video, voice, data and 3D graphics for gaming and other popular mobile applications for consumers.
“Marvell is proud to have been an early technology partner to China Mobile on the development of the OPhone smartphone and we are delighted to see the rapid and broad adoption of China’s TD-SCDMA standard,” said Ms. Weili Dai, Marvell’s Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of Marvell Semiconductor’s Consumer and Computing Business Unit. “… The collaboration with China Mobile affirms our commitment to drive the smartphone for mass market adoption and to deliver the ‘always-on lifestyle’ to consumers around the world.”
“China Mobile’s vision of the sub-1000 RMB (sub $150) TD-SCDMA OPhones will become a reality because of our collaboration with leading companies like Marvell,” said Bill Huang general manager of China Mobile Research Institute. “Marvell and China Mobile are excited by the rapid progress we have made in the TD-SCDMA technical cooperation.”
As the world’s first solution with a built-in TD-SCDMA platform solution with a 55nm design, the Pantheon 920 is a high performance, highly integrated solution that helps make smartphones far more affordable than feature phones while providing enhanced performance compared to current smartphones.
The Pantheon 920 processor [exactly the same as the PXA 920 announced in Sept 2009]supports all leading open operating system (OS) software platforms and come with a dedicated high performance ARM instruction set compliant Marvell CPU processor, high performance HD video, 3D graphics accelerators, and industry’s leading TD-SCDMA modem with 2.8Mbps HSDPA and 2.2Mbps HSUPA.
Certainly it could be the case that the next round of China Mobile tender for sub 2,000 yuan (sub $300) handset procurements will be won by Marvell. The sub 1,000 yuan (sub $150) segment, however, has been lost for them.
Background on Chinese chipmakers now succeeding against Marvell and all other international operations
When looking into the background of local chipmakers, especially that of the biggest winner Leadcore technology, one thing becomes absolutely clear. The telecommunication chip supply is as much under state control as the whole telecommunication market. Moreover every strategy related decision, which of this procurement process is just one example, is under direct control of the Central Commitee of the Chinese Communist Party. As as consequence there is no wonder that no international chip maker has any chance to penetrate the mass handset market technologically viable for local chipmakers. It is quite probable that the Central Commitee wants to build an internationally competitive local chip industry via the huge volumes available on their home handset market. Some evidence:
– Leadcore Unveiled oPhone Solutions to Strengthen the High-end TD-SCDMA Handset [April 23, 2009]
On April 23, 2009, in the Leadcore Technology Annual Client Conference 2009, Mr. Sun Yu, the president of Leadcore Tech revealed the progress of TD-SCDMA terminals development. Mr. Sun Yu said that more than 60 handsets are based on the Leadcore solutions in the current 100 TD-SCDMA handsets. More than 70% TD-SCDMA terminals products in the market were derived from the Leadcore’s DTivy. The Pecker test terminal launched by the Leadcore technology occupied the vast majority share of TD-SCDMA test terminal market. He also revealed that China Mobile was taking its great effort to R&D the solutions of OMS-based TD-SCDMA handset, oPhone, which will be released by Leadcore on April 23, 2009.
– TD Forum Attended Leadcore Technology Client Conference to Witness the New Heights of Chip Manufacturers [April 22, 2010]
– Continuous innovation to lead the future – the core technology wonderful debut thirteenth China Beijing International High-Tech Expo [May 27, 2010], as translated from Chinese by Google:
展会期间联芯科技展位受到了中央领导以及参展观众的高度关注，取得良好反响。 Core Technology Alliance booth during the exhibition by the central leadership and the participating audience attention and achieved good response. 中共中央政治局委员、市委书记刘淇，中共中央政治局委员、国务委员刘延东，国务委员、公安部部长孟建柱，均来到联芯科技TD联盟展位驻足参观，了解公司最新技术与市场化成果。 CPC Central Committee, Liu Qi, Party Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, State Councilor Liu Yandong, State Councilor and Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu, are the core technology to the joint booth TD Union stopped to visit, understand the latest technology and market results.
– General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPC, Chinese President and Chairman of Central Military Commission, Jintao Hu paid an inspection visit to Spreadtrum Communications (Shanghai) Co., Ltd [Jan 18, 2010]
– Hu calls for independent innovation [Jan 18, 2010]:
Hu Jintao (R front), general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, shakes hands with young members of the research and development team as he inspects Spreadtrum Communications, Inc., in Shanghai, east China, on Jan. 16, 2010. Hu Jintao made an inspection tour in Shanghai on Jan. 14-17. [Xinhua]
… At the Spreadtrum Communication, Inc., a high-tech company founded by returned overseas students, Hu said independent innovation is the lifeline of a company. He told the company staff “I hope you could make further breakthroughs in core technologies, so as to boost China’s communication industry.”
– Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. Announces $44 Million of New Financing [May 5, 2009]:
“We very much appreciate and are excited to receive this nearly interest-free financing. This indicates the Chinese government’s strong support and high confidence in Spreadtrum to develop semiconductor products in 2nd and 3rd generation wireless communications in the Chinese market. We plan to use our borrowings under the loan to increase R&D investment in our GSM and TD-SCDMA projects and to expand our IC operations in China. With our strengthened financial position, we are more confident in our ability to overcome the difficulties caused by the current worldwide economic and financial crisis and do not expect to need to raise additional funds in the near future,” said Dr. Leo Li, president and chief executive officer of Spreadtrum Communications, Inc.
And these are just the visible indications that local chipmakers are getting huge government subsidies. And T3G, now a wholly owned subsidiary of ST Ericsson, has also been a very much preferred player because of its parent’s huge patent portfolio and international Ericsson influence in the strategic (for China’s local and foreign market efforts) LTE wins (see: IMT-Advanced (4G) for the next-generations of interactive mobile services, China is triumphant [Oct 24, 2010]). With that they can beat even the best international chip house, the Marvell Technology Group.
1. Leadcore Technology (part of the state-owned Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Group)
The current outcome is not the first time for the biggest winner Leadcore Tedchnology (with seven of the 12 models using its TD-SCDAM chip, i.e. 58% or 3.5M chips) as evidenced by one and a half years old news of Leadcore Technology Gets Big Order from China Mobile [May 21, 2009]:
Leadcore Technology Co., Ltd., together with its three partners, wins nearly a half of the CNY 600 million subsidy from China Mobile in the telecom carrier’s latest round of bidding for TD-SCDMA terminal procurement
…
Leadcore’s mobile phone chips are applied in five models of TD-SDMA mobile phones that are ordered by China Mobile this time.
The TD-SCDMA network operator has ordered 11 models of mobile phones, including the Leadcore chip-powered low-end TD-SCDMA devices launched by ZTE Corporation (SZSE: 000063 and SEHK: 0763) and LG, as well as the Leadcore chip-based flagship broadband TD-SCDMA products rolled out by LG, ZTE, and Yulong Computer Telecommunication Scientific (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.
The other companies share the TD-SCDMA terminal order from China Mobile include T3G Technology Co., Ltd., Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: SPRD), Dopod Communication Corporation, Motorola, Samsung, Huawei Technologies, Hisense, and Guangzhou New Postcom Equipment.
Leadcore Technology’s lead on the technology market for TD-SCDMA terminals goes back to the very beginning as was reported by Datang Licensed TD Tech from Leadcore [Sept. 30, 2009]:
Sun Yuwang, president at Leadcore Technology, once said that more than 60 of the over 100 TD handsets that have gotten network access licenses in the country have been equipped with Leadcore chips, with an additional 14 new models afoot. Among the top four PC makers in the world, Lenovo, HP and Acer have all adopted Leadcore’s products.
Leadcore’s TD chip shipment outpaced 1 million pieces this past April, topping 2 million by the end of this August. Now the company is holding more than 60% of the domestic TD chip market.
Leadcore’s dominance has been further evidenced by TD Forum Attended Leadcore Technology Client Conference to Witness the New Heights of Chip Manufacturers [April 22, 2010]:
Dr. Jing Wang, Secretary-general of TD Forum attended the conference and witnessed great achievements gained by TD-SCDMA chip manufacturers since TD-SCDMA commercialization one year ago. With the further mature of TD-SCDMA market and gradually strengthened cooperation among related parts of TD-SCDMA industry, the problems occurred in the development of TD-SCDMA industry will be resolved effectively.
Leadcore is part of the state-owned Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Group which has the following structure:
with officially provided links as below:
Affiliations
Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Holdings Co.,Ltd.
- Datang Mobile Communications Equipment Co., Ltd.
- Leadcore Technology Co.,Ltd.
- Beijing Xinwei Telecom Technology Co.,Ltd.
- Datang Capital(Beijing) Co.,Ltd.
Datang Telecom Technology Co.,Ltd.
GoHigh Data Networks Technology Co.,Ltd.
Unit in charge
State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council
Among the affiliate links given above there is no link for Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) although on the stucture image it is listed as part of the Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Holdings Co.,Ltd.
- Update: Datang to raise stake in SMIC, says report [Nov 23]:
Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Holdings has agreed to acquire US$102 million worth of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) shares to bring its stake in the foundry chipmaker to 20%, according to a Chinese-language sina.com report.
The report said SMIC will use the new funds mainly to expand advanced process capacity at its 12-inch fabs.
Datang, directly owned by China’s central government, is currently the majority shareholder of SMIC with a 16.6% stake.
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) will pump at least US$2 billion into research and development annually in the future, aiming to develop “world-class” technologies and manufacturing within the next five years, according to Jiang Shang Zhou, chairman of the China-based foundry chipmaker.
…
SMIC is now undertaking a project to ramp up 45nm process capacity, which will cost it a total of about US$4 billion, Jiang noted. In addition, the company’s next move to a 32nm technology will initially require US$600 million, Jiang added.
Soon the Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Group will be even larger as per the news that China Potevio to merge with Datang [July 15, 2010]:
The government has decided to merge two State-owned telecom equipment makers – China Datang Corp and Potevio – by the end of this year, sources from Datang said on Wednesday.
The merged entity is expected to become the third-biggest telecom equipment maker in China after Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp, the source said.
…
Datang is a large power generation company and one of the key promoters of the TD-SCDMA standard in the nation.
China Potevio is a leading IT equipment manufacturer and service provider. Its main businesses span the manufacture of telecommunications products, the application of telecom products, and the informatization of broadcasting and TV.
The group is also playing an active role in high-tech investments as per Datang Telecom planning PE fund [May 20, 2010]:
Telecom equipment maker Datang Telecom on Wednesday said it plans to set up a 5 billion yuan ($732.18 million) private equity (PE) fund for investments in the booming Internet of Things (IOT) industry.
Datang will partner with the Wuxi New District Venture Investment Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Wuxi Guolian Development (Group) Co to set up the PE fund with a corpus of 1 billion yuan in the first stage.
The company will invest 200 million yuan during the first stage of fundraising and hold a 40 percent equity stake in the fund management company being set up to manage the private equity fund.
IOT refers to networks of real-world objects linked to the Internet that interact through web services. The technology is based on the concept that all real-world objects can be identified and managed by computers if they are equipped with radio tags and linked to the Internet. Technologies such as radio frequency identification and sensors form the cornerstones of the network.
What is the current status of the group and Leadcore itself in relationship to China’s own TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE technologies? The Datang Telecom Group was awarded “2nd China Annual 3G Prize” [June 30, 2010] press release is giving all the details (emphasis is mine):
Since Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of PR China issued 3G licenses in January 2009, in TD-SCDMA industry DTG has occupied 30% of market share in system equipment, and 50% in chips and Solutions.
Currently, DTG possesses the most comprehensive TD-SCDMA solutions for all circumstances in the industry, and is competent to provide complete, end to end TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE business solutions. DTG has already provided network equipment supply and construction services to Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and other key provinces. DTG actively cooperated with China Mobile to accomplish coverage of complex scenes, such as, intensive urban areas, large scaled stadiums, maglev trains and Cross-ocean Bridge, and provided premium green network with TD-SCDMA technology. All products provided by DTG are ready for smooth evolution towards TD-LTE. This award collectively represents high recognition and acceptance towards Datang Telecom Group for its contribution in promoting the development of Chinese telecommunication industry.
LeadCore Technology, winner of “TD-SCDMA terminal chip and the best solution provider”, is the core enterprise specialized in TD-SCDMA terminal industry in DTG. As a chip enterprise in the upstream position of industrial chain, Leadcore Technology always focuses on layout of industrial chain and value chain; Leadcore adheres to technology innovation and market-orientation; promotes industrialization of innovation achievements, persists in pursuing win-win situation from cooperation and also coordinates with the partners from industrial chain, so as to promote rapid and healthy development of TD-SCDMA industry.
2. Spreadtrum Communications, Inc (founded by Chinese expatriates in 2001, a public company since 2007 with principal executive offices and most operations in China but incorporated in Cayman Islands)
– Spreadtrum and Hisense Jointly Launched the World’s First Affordable TD-SCDMA Phone Supporting CMMB Digital TV [Jan 10, 2010]
Hisense N51 was jointly developed by Spreadtrum and Hisense in a highly collaborative technical partnership. Executive Vice President of Hisense Communication, Ms. Wenlin Yang, said: “Hisense and Spreadtrum share a long history of co-operation. Partnering with Spreadtrum, we successfully won the bid of ‘thousand-yuan 3G mobile phones’ project of China Mobile’s ‘TD-SCDMA Terminal Special Incentive Fund Project.’ Through our six-month joint efforts and Spreadtrum’s very competitive TD-SCDMA and CMMB solutions, the Hisense N51 was introduced. … “
President and CEO of Spreadtrum Communications, Inc., Dr. Leo Li, said: “… Spreadtrum provides highly integrated TD-SCDMA/HSDPA/GSM/GPRS/EDGE baseband chip SC8800H and RF chip QS3200, which effectively reduce the cost of development and manufacturing of Hisense Communication products. Therefore, Hisense Communication is able to introduce cost-effective handsets such as N51 by targeting the Chinese 3G market quickly to meet the needs of consumers. Spreadtrum CMMB mobile TV chip SC6600V provides Hisense N51 with vast application space. Particularly, Hisense N51 is currently the world’s only 1000 RMB level TD-SCDMA phone that supports CMMB.”
– Spreadtrum’s TD-SCDMA Chip Adopted in the World’s First 3G OPhone Lenovo O1 [Dec 14, 2009]:
Lenovo Mobile Communication Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Lenovo Mobile”) launched the world’s first TD-SCDMA standard-based OPhone smart phones – Lenovo O1, with immediate sales in all local markets in mainland China. The phone is based on Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. (hereinafter referred to as “Spreadtrum”, Nasdaq: SPRD) TD-SCDMA solution, and supports China Mobile OPhone OS smart phone operating system.
Spreadtrum and Lenovo Mobile, in a highly collaborative technical partnership, jointly developed Lenovo O1. This new handset runs on the China Mobile led developed Intelligent Terminal software platform – the OPhone platform. Lenovo 01 uses Spreadtrum’s TD-SCDMA/HSDPA / GSM / GPRS / EDGE baseband chip SC8800S and radio frequency (“RF”) chip QS3200.
– Spreadtrum and China Telecommunications Technology Labs Announce Strategic Partnership to Promote New Technologies and Services [May 15, 2009]
A unique industry chain capability has developed in China’s mobile phone industry, which now comprises of design, R&D, support, production, marketing, etc. This development will enhance the competitiveness of phones made in China for the local and overseas markets. With the strategic partnership of CTTL and Spreadtrum, our cooperation will create new technologies and services in wireless communications and multimedia terminals. For example, we expect to innovative services by utilizing our combined resources and new techniques in 2G and 3G networks to develop high-tech information security technologies for the mobile and multimedia markets. Our cooperation will simultaneously broaden and strengthen interactions in the industry chain.
… China Telecommunications Technology Labs (“CTTL”), founded in 1981, was named under the authorization of the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) and the State General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ). Currently, CTTL is administrated by the China Academy of Telecommunications Research (CATR) and was formed through re-organization and merges of four divisions of CATR, i.e. the Research Institute of Telecommunications Transmission (RITT), the Telecommunications Metrology Center (TMC), the Research Institute for Industry Standard of Posts and Telecommunications (PTISR), the CTTL Anti-seismic Research Institute of Telecommunications Equipment, BaoDing (ARITE). It is a leading high-tech laboratory with the following missions: telecommunications technology development, telecommunications product standards and test methods research, telecommunications metrology standards and methods research, products inspection, verification and technical assessment and testing instruments metrology and evaluation of communications software.
– Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. Announces $44 Million of New Financing [May 5, 2009]:
“We very much appreciate and are excited to receive this nearly interest-free financing. This indicates the Chinese government’s strong support and high confidence in Spreadtrum to develop semiconductor products in 2nd and 3rd generation wireless communications in the Chinese market. We plan to use our borrowings under the loan to increase R&D investment in our GSM and TD-SCDMA projects and to expand our IC operations in China. With our strengthened financial position, we are more confident in our ability to overcome the difficulties caused by the current worldwide economic and financial crisis and do not expect to need to raise additional funds in the near future,” said Dr. Leo Li, president and chief executive officer of Spreadtrum Communications, Inc.
– Spreadtrum: TD-based Chip Shipment Totaled 100,000 [March 6, 2009]:
Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. clarified on March 3, 2009 that the shipment of its TD-SCDMA-based chips totaled nearly 100,000.
Earlier, the shipment of Spreadtrum’s TD-SCDMA-based chips was reported to reach 10,000 or so. The number is inaccurate, explained the Nasdaq-listed company, adding that mobile phones adopting its chips accounted for nearly one third of China’s procurement of 300,000 TD-SCDMA cellphones and terminals.
The Shanghai-based company incurred a net loss of USD 31.3 million for the third quarter of 2008, in contrast to a net profits of USD 6.1 million Q3 2007 and USD 2.6 million in Q2 2008
– Spreadtrum Announces World’s First TD-SCDMA/HSDPA/EDGE/GPRS/GSM Single-chip RF Transceiver – The QS3200 RF transceiver features high integration and low power consumption and provides 2G/2.5G/3G/3.5G multimode support [Feb 16, 2009]:
Followed by the GSM/GPRS single-chip RF transceiver, the QS500, and the GSM/GPRS/EDGE single-chip RF transceiver, the QS1000, today Spreadtrum announced the QS3200, the world’s first single-chip RF transceiver to support multimode such as 2G/3G/3.5G. The QS3200 offers great improvement over the other TD-SCDMA RF chip on signal transmission, reception, and power amplification in addition to the integrated features and low power consumption in Spreadtrum’s other chip solutions. The launch of the QS3200 makes Spreadtrum one of the total solution providers in the wireless communications market and takes a positive step forward in commercializing TD-SCDMA technology.
– Spreadtrum Announces SC6600V: First Single-Chip Demodulator/Decoder for CMMB-Based Mobile TV [May 7, 2008]
Spreadtrum’s new SC6600V solution is an integrated CMMB demodulator and source decoder chip and is the first single chip solution that supports both AVS and H.264 video decoding standards. As the first CMMB single chip solution for mobile TV, the SC6600V is designed for feature phones. The SC6600V adopts an integrated platform design for communications and mobile multimedia to reduce the design period of Spreadtrum’s customers. … Spreadtrum’s SC6600V single-chip solution is designed to enable handset makers and carriers to offer mobile TV feature in feature phones at reasonable prices, instead of being relegated to expensive SmartPhones as most mobile TV solutions are currently.
… CMMB is a homegrown mobile TV standard that applies to mobile devices such as mobile phones, PDAs and Portable Media Players (PMPs). It features free mobility, rich video and data services. In addition, it provides consumers with cost-effective mobile TV service that satisfies most consumers’ needs and is expected to be used in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.
Mr. Ma Jv, President, Academy of Broadcasting Science of the State Administration of Radio Film and Television, indicated that, “We are very glad that Spreadtrum has developed the SC6600V, the first CMMB-based Mobile TV single chip solution for mobile phones, which integrated demultiplex, channel decoder and source decoder. We believe that it will help CMMB start to grow its market quickly, and we hope Spreadtrum will continue to unleash its technology strengths, allowing it to contribute to the CMMB industry’s ongoing development and road to becoming prosperous.”
– Spreadtrum Communications Completes Acquisition of Quorum Systems [Jan 16, 2008]:
With the acquisition of Quorum, Spreadtrum gains a highly skilled RF engineering team of 30 engineers with an average of 10 years of industry experience. The combination of Spreadtrum’s leading single-chip baseband solutions with Quorum’s complementary, low-power high-performance RF designs is expected to strengthen Spreadtrum’s competitive position in the wireless market, including in 2G, 3G, RF, baseband, physical layer software, protocol and applications. Since its founding in 2003, Quorum has created multi-band transceiver designs ranging from GSM/GPRS/EDGE to WCDMA and 3G HSDPA application, plus a recently announced TD-SCDMA platform.
3. T3G (an ST Ericssson subsidiary since December 2008)
T3G has achieved an impressive record of world firsts in bringing innovation to China:
- The world’s first ASIC based TD-SCDMA system level call achieved in 2004
- The world’s first international TD-SCDMA call in 2004
- The world’s first 384Kbps commercial TD-SCDMA/EDGE dual-mode Samsung phone, powered by T3G’s chipset in 2005
- The world’s first ASIC based 2.8Mbps TD-HSDPA system call achieved in 2007
- The world’s first 2.8 million TD-HSDPA/EDGE dual-mode dual-band commercial data card powered by T3G’s chipset in 2008
- Completed the world’s first TD-LTE end-to-end application demonstration on multimode soft modem platform in 2009
- Launched the world’s first TD-HSPA chip in 65nm in 2009
– Strong presence and identity in China:
ST-Ericsson, through its subsidiary T3G, has been actively developing platforms for the TD mobile standard since 2003. The company’s extensive investment in technology and product development has given it a leadership position in the market. The company provides solutions to Chinese and global handset manufactures and design houses. It offers mobile chipsets, software protocols, system reference designs and customized technical support. In May 2009, ST-Ericsson was selected by China Mobile as a major technology partner for the development of its highend and low-cost handsets. The company will also support four of its customers to commercialize their mobile phones during 2009-2010.
…
- ST-Ericsson’s 550 employees are based in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong
- ST-Ericsson (ST-NXP Wireless) acquired T3G in December 2008. T3G was established in January 2003 as a joint venture. Its founding partners were Philips Semiconductors (later NXP Semiconductors, and finally ST-NXP Wireless), Datang Mobile, Samsung Electronics, and since 2005 also Motorola. T3G is based in Beijing.
– Datang set to sell off T3G stake [June 19, 2008]:
Datang Mobile, the second largest stakeholder of T3G, is putting its 32.11 percent stake on sale for 122.2 million yuan, according to a notice posted on the website of Beijing Equity Exchange.
The move comes on the heels of the collapse of Commit Inc, another major TD-SCDMA chipmaker, which has dimmed the prospects of TD-SCDMA.
There are rumors that Geneva-based semiconductor maker STMicroelectronics might take over Datang Mobile’s stake in T3G.
…
Commit has had its own share of woes, forcing it to shut shop at the end of April after failing to secure fresh funding and pay its employees for months. Commit’s shareholders include Hyper Market, Texas Instruments, Nokia, LG and State-owned Potevio and Datang Telecom, parent of Datang Mobile.
Industry observers blame Commit and T3G’s woes on the slow roll-out of TD-SCDMA in China.
– ST-Ericsson and China Mobile to Bring TD-SCDMA to the Mass Market [May 26, 2009]:
China Mobile has selected ST-Ericsson’s company in China, T3G, as a major technology partner for the development of its high-end and low-cost handsets, based on the 3G standard TD-SCDMA. ST-Ericsson will also support four of its customers to commercialize their mobile phones during 2009-2010.
Under the agreement, ST-Ericsson, the 50/50 joint venture between Ericsson and STMicroelectronics, will develop a new low-cost platform to support its customers to offer affordable TD-SCDMA devices to the China consumers. ST-Ericsson will also support customers to develop high-end mobile phones, based on existing and new platforms such as the T7210, which will allow consumers to enjoy high-speed broadband and multimedia services.
“Although ST-Ericsson is a recent joint venture, our subsidiary T3G has been actively developing platforms for the mobile standard for more than six years, achieving an impressive record of world firsts in bringing innovation to China,” said Alain Dutheil, President and CEO of ST-Ericsson. “Our dedicated local R&D team, as well as our strong commitment to continuous innovation and close cooperation with customers, will enable China Mobile to offer a broad range of handsets for the mass market as well as for the high-end segment.”
ST-Ericsson’s T7210 mobile platform supports TD-SCDMA dual-band in 2010-2025MHz/1880-1920MHz frequencies, and has successfully completed handovers of voice and high-speed data services in order to operate optimally in Chinese dual-band network environments.
– ST-Ericsson Continues to Drive Innovation in TD Market [Sept 14, 2009]:
ST-Ericsson, a world leader in wireless platforms and semiconductors, and its Chinese subsidiary T3G today announced the industry’s first TD-HSPA modem chip samples in 65nm. This new chip is smaller than existing products, making it easier to implement in mobile devices, and is also designed to reach significantly lower power consumption.
– ST-Ericsson reaches key milestones in China [Nov 27, 2009]:
Confirms clear market leadership in the TD-technology
- Five million TD chipsets shipped
- ST-Ericsson’s solutions power more than 100 models of TD devices, including handsets, data cards and embedded devices
ST-Ericsson, a world leader in wireless platforms and semiconductors, has reached two important milestones, confirming its market leadership in the Chinese homegrown 3G standard, TD-SCDMA. ST-Ericsson, through its Chinese subsidiary T3G, has been leading the innovation in the TD market since 2003, bringing numerous industry firsts.
… Read more at: http://www.stericsson.com/press/Strong_presence_china_English.pdf
– ST-Ericsson to cooperate with China Mobile on TD-LTE [Feb 16, 2010]:
ST-Ericsson, a world leader in wireless platforms and semiconductors, announced today it will cooperate with China Mobile on TD-LTE development and will support a demonstration of TD-LTE at Shanghai World EXPO in 2010.
ST-Ericsson will also actively participate on other TD-LTE projects organized by China Mobile, including trial and interoperability testing (IOT) with infrastructure vendors.
Bill Huang, General Manager of China Mobile Research Institute, said: “China Mobile and ST-Ericsson are co-operating very successfully on TD-SCDMA technology and we are happy to extend our partnership into the TD-LTE area and then multi-mode technologies in future. We share a common goal of creating a global LTE market encompassing both TDD and FDD technologies.”
…
ST-Ericsson’s key milestones in LTE:
- In December 2009, ST-Ericsson and Ericsson were first to achieve LTE and HSPA mobility with a multimode device. Read more at www.stericsson.com/press_releases/LTE_HSPA.jsp
- 2009: Fully working LTE chipset available and interoperability testing of the platform with operators
- 2008: Platform interoperability tests activities initiated with network vendors
- 2007: First handheld LTE prototype available and first handheld public demonstration at Mobile World Congress in 2008
- 2004-2005: ST-Ericsson started research and standardization activities related to LTE
– ST-Ericsson launches feature rich mobile internet platform in China – T6718 enables development of cost-effective and power-efficient multimedia TD-HSPA handsets [May 27, 2010]:
The T6718 is the first commercial 65 nanometer-based TD-HSPA platform, enabling manufacturers to quickly produce compact, cost efficient and feature-rich mobile broadband handsets for the Chinese market. ST-Ericsson expects the T6718, which can support downlink speeds of 2.8Mbps and uplink speeds of 2.2Mbps, to be in commercial products from Q3 2010.
… Handsets based on the T6718 platform will be able to deliver up to seven hours of talk-time or 25 days of standby on one battery charge. Incorporating software support for Assisted-GPS (AGPS), the T6718 will also enable location-based services, such as navigation and local search.
The dual mode TD-HSPA/EDGE modem is integrated with an ARM processor to deliver small size, fast response time and low power. This is also the first TD-HSPA solution to take advantage of the additional size and power benefits of the 65 nm process node.
The T6718 delivers a rich Internet experience including fast browsing, streaming video, broadcast television and other multimedia services on a touch-screen display. The 5 Mpixel camera support and video recording capability coupled with the graphics hardware accelerator provide a great visual consumer experience. Furthermore, the T6718 has the lowest power consumption in its class which means more hours enjoying music, video, internet access and talking.
…
High performance and low power consumption
- The first commercial 65 nanometer based TD-SCDMA
platform on the market- Talk time up to 7 hours and stand by up to 25 days on one battery charge (standard 1000mAh battery)
- ARM926 processor up to 416 MHz
Marvell ARMADA with sun readable and unbreakable Pixel Qi screen, and target [mass] manufacturing cost of $75
Update: OLPC plans solar charging, satellite Internet for XO-3 [July 20, 2011]
The XO-3 will become available early next year or perhaps sooner, and price is still being determined, but it will still be under $100, Negroponte said.
The tablet will also include a camera on top of the screen, placed inside the bezel surrounding the display. A microphone will be placed in the bezel under the screen, and USB 2.0 ports and a headphone jack will be on the sides.
Decisions are still being made about the display, which is holding up development of the device, Negroponte said. OLPC wants a transflective screen, much like the current XO, but with improved richness in e-ink and transmissive modes. OLPC plans to use spin-off Pixel Qi’s hybrid screen …
The original post:
Pixel Qi’s problems with mass manufacturing are well described in the latest June 3. update of Pixel Qi’s first big name device manufacturing partner is the extremely ambitious ZTE [Feb 15, 2011].
This all comes together in a prototype form to be shown sometime in the middle of February 2011 as per OLPC XO-3 Tablet Delayed [Nov 3]. Product delivery would be ready by the end of 2011 in a form suitable for developed countries, then a year later in another form for developing nations of the world. While an advanced cloud client capability based on then latest version of Google’s Android operating system will be perfect for the 1st world countries, the 3d world will get a next generation version of the current XO-1 and XO-1.5 computer from OLPC .
Follow-up: High expectations on Marvell’s opportunities with China Mobile [May 28, 2011]
Update: that plan is going well with the progress as best reported by XO-1.75: cutting through the nonsense [Jan 11, 2011] referring to the corrections by the VP of Hardware Engineering at OLPC to errors in a CES 2011 report, and also comments throughout the blogosphere regarding the absolutely coincidental announcement by Microsoft of their ARM support:
There were several errors in that [CES 2011] news article [with title: OLPC cuts price of XO 1.75 laptop to $165, power by half [Jan 7, 2011]] which I would like to clear up:
- the XO-1.75 will not have an 8.9” screen, but will continue with the sunlight readable 7.5” screen designed by Mary Lou Jepsen (now at Pixel Qi) used in the XO-1 and 1.5.
- the $165 price is fiction (BOM price hasn’t been finalized), but probably not very far from the truth for the non-touchscreen equipped version. Please don’t forget that since we don’t add any profit margin, the laptop price directly depends on the volume ordered.
- the switch to ARM was completely independent of any future support for ARM in Windows. That support was announced this week, while I’ve been pursuing this ARM design for three years, with active development over the last eight months. Furthermore, we are using the Marvell Armada 610, which won’t be supported by Windows (if you believe M$).
- Linux has shipped, and will continue to ship, on EVERY XO produced. You can believe random commenters, or you can believe the person who signs off on every SKU produced.
I’ll also add that a lot of work has gone into software development, including porting Fedora 14 to ARM and adding multi-touch support to the Sugar UI. This has been a long time in the making, and the announcement of Microsoft’s ARM port is a coincidence. Sorry, no riveting conspiracies here.
Some media reports have been implying that mass production will start by mid-year. This is incorrect. It may possibly be that the design is finalised by then, but planning and tooling for mass production and deliveries is quite an endeavour beyond that.
If you want the real information on the XO-1.75, look at the OLPC Wiki page. Right now, they’re up to Alpha test model 2. If you want to view or take part in the development discussion, head over to the devel mailing list (strictly speaking, this list is for software development, but the community are discussing the hardware there too).
Notes [Jan 11, 2011]: On the OLPC Wiki page for the XO-1.75 there is a link to the Announce: OLPC software strategy [July 7, 2010] in which you can find the following crucial statements:
XO-1.75 and beyond
XO-1.75 software development is underway. Today we’re announcing that we’re planning on using Fedora as the base distribution for the XO-1.75. This wasn’t an obvious decision — ARM is not a release architecture in Fedora, and so we’re committing to help out with that port. Our reasons for choosing Fedora even though ARM work is needed were that we don’t want to force our deployments to learn a new distribution and re-write any customizations they’ve written, we want to reuse the packaging work that’s already been done in Fedora for OLPC and Sugar packages, and we want to continue our collaboration with the Fedora community who we’re getting to know and work with well.
[Fedora was chosen more than two years ago and delivered in the very convenient Fedora 10 on SD card [Nov 28, 2008] format. This is why it has such a widespread use in the OLPC community, especially among adults who do not want to use the child focused graphical interface called Sugar but rather a desktop environment on their XOs.]
BACK TO THE ORIGINAL [Nov 4, 2010] POST:
Whatever will be delivered by Windows 7 tablets/slates with Oak Trail Atom SoC in December [Nov 1] or anything else the next XO-3 tablet effort outlined below will be an enormous threat to the current ICT establishment, everybody included (mighty Apple as well).
Two undisputed technology leaders are behind the whole engineering effort: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. for the leading System-on-a-Chip (SoC) capability and Pixel Qi Corporation for the incredible screen.
Follow up: Marvell to capitalize on BRIC market with the Moby tablet [Feb 3, 2011]
Follow-up: Kinoma is now the marvellous software owned by Marvell [Feb 15, 2011]
Update [Jan 6, 2011]: Marvell 100 series tablet [Jan 6, 2011] is giving quite a credibility to the follow-up project described in the rest of our post
[CES 2011] Marvell’s foray into the tablet market sees this rather cute and well designed model, the 100 series. Unlike other tablets that are in the market, this one comes with Android 2.2 (instead of 2.1), while sporting a rather young, all-white design with all the lines in the right places. A microSD memory card slot is there for expansion purposes, and you won’t get multi-touch support on the 10” display which is a bummer, so forget about zooming in or out in Angry Birds. There is 1GB of internal memory inside, while Wi-Fi connectivity is supported although 3G will not be present when it hits the market sometime this year for $199 a pop [with $99 manufacturing cost — see in the below video]. Of course, as with Marvell’s OLPC project, the 100 series will target the educational environment more. It is pretty heavy, but it won’t weigh a ton like most textbooks. Looks hardy enough to stand up to the rigors of restless kids, too! Interestingly enough, being an Android-powered device, it has more than the usual 4 buttons of Home, Menu, Back and Search, but will include the “Up” and “Down” buttons, too.
Update [Jan 10, 2011]: Mobylize Tablet on ABC News: Good to Know [Jan 10, 2011]
Note while watching the video that the LCD screen used in the tablet has wide viewing angle.
Update [Nov 2]: Sehat Sutardja: An Engineering Marvell by IEEE Spectrum [Nov 2, in print Oct 27 but with the title of Marvell Inside] is describing the extremely deep electronic engineering mentality lead by the CEO of Marvell Technology Group Ltd. as the secret recipe for success from the very beginning:
Sehat already had plans for the first product: a better read channel for disk drives. It sounds incredibly specialized and it is, but it’s also one of the drive’s key components. The read channel takes the analog signal coming from the magnetic head as it scans the disk, converts the noisy signal to digital, and puts that information out onto the bus that will take it to the computer. Existing read channels used a bipolar transistor on a complementary-metal-oxide semiconductor substrate (BiCMOS), but Sehat planned to use only CMOS. That way the channels could be manufactured by a chip foundry like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., so Marvell wouldn’t have to build its own fab. Using CMOS also meant that the device would consume less power. This would, however, present an engineering challenge: Existing CMOS read-channel designs were much slower than BiCMOS.
… they convinced Seagate Technology to take a chance. Ken Burns, an executive at Seagate, told them that the company’s next-generation drive would need a read channel at 240 Mb/s—could Marvell deliver? … They told Burns yes. In less than three months the Marvell team hit the 240-Mb/s mark, and Seagate became Marvell’s first customer. … Today, in terms of units sold, Marvell has about 60 percent of the market for hard drive systems-on-a-chip.
“This little start-up, with one product line, put Texas Instruments out of the read-channel business,” Ohr [an analyst with Gartner] says.
Added later: Winner: Pixel Qi’s Everywhere Display by IEEE Spectrum [Jan 20, 2010] is well describing the innovative screen technology in a way that the leading mind behind, Ms. Mary Lou Jepsen is also well represented. Here is a key excerpt from that:
The Pixel Qi display consumes far less power than traditional LCDs, drawing a peak of about 2.5 watts, of which the backlight accounts for about 2 W, says Jepsen. Turn off that light and slow the refresh rate, and you can maintain a static image—such as the page you’re reading now—with just half a watt. That’s still more power than is needed by electrophoretic displays, the generic term for the kind made by E Ink [and used in most e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle devices]. Electrophoretic screens are bistable, which means that the pixels can maintain a static image powerlessly. But e-paper also requires a higher operating voltage than the Pixel Qi screen, which means that if future e-paper displays offer faster refresh rates, their power advantage will likely wane.
… Pixel Qi has also beat E Ink to color. In the Spectrum conference room, Jepsen cranks the backlight all the way up to show off the color and video playback. The video is perfectly watchable, although it probably wouldn’t be your first choice if movies were the primary application [like with the TV sets]. The colors don’t look as saturated as they would on a glossy cinema display, but at least the blacks in dark scenes are very black. In other words, the Pixel Qi screen offers an excellent compromise for a class of gadgets defined by their low-cost versatility.
READ ALL the details below in order to understand the reality of the – seemingly, believe me just seemingly – bombastic claim in the introduction (… this will be an enormous threat to the current ICT establishment …)!
Here is the video interview accompanying the article referred in the introduction, to start with:
This engineering effort goes back to May with announcement that One Laptop per Child and Marvell Join Forces to Redefine Tablet Computing for Students Around the World [May 27]. The most important details are (emphasis is mine):
The new family of XO tablets will incorporate elements and new capabilities based on feedback from the nearly 2 million children and families around the world who use the current XO laptop. The XO tablet, for example, will require approximately one watt of power to operate (compared to about 5 watts necessary for the current XO laptop). The XO tablet will also feature a multi-lingual soft keyboard with touch feedback, enabling it to serve millions more children who speak virtually any language anywhere in the world.
The device is also decidedly “constructionist” in nature. By design, it combines hardware and software to deliver a platform that will enable educators, students and families around the world to create their own content, and learn to read, write, and create their own education programs and share all of these experiences via a mesh network model. The device will also feature an application to directly access more than 2 million free books available across the Internet.
“While devices like eReaders and current tablets are terrific literary, media and entertainment platforms, they don’t meet the needs of an educational model based on making things, versus just consuming them. Today’s learning environments require robust platforms for computation, content creation and experimentation – and all that at a very low cost,” said Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and Chairman of One Laptop per Child.
… “Marvell has made a long-term commitment to improving education and inspiring a revolution in the application of technology in the classroom. The Moby tablet platform – and our partnership with OLPC – represents our joint passion and commitment to give students the power to learn, create, connect and collaborate in entirely new ways,” said Weili Dai, Marvell’s Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of the Consumer and Computing Business Unit. “Marvell’s cutting edge technology – including live content, high quality video (1080p full-HD encode and decode), high performance 3D graphics, Flash 10 Internet and two-way teleconferencing – will fundamentally improve the way students learn by giving them more efficient, relevant – even fun tools to use. …”
Marvell indeed has all the necessary SoC prerequisites and credentials for such a fantastic goal (both technically and market-wise) as described in my post Marvell ARMADA beats Qualcomm Snapdragon, NVIDIA Tegra and Samsung/Apple Hummingbird in the SoC market [again] [Sept 23] (BTW the most popular post on my blog by far).
The details of the original plan were described in OLPC’s Negroponte says XO-3 prototype tablet coming in 2010 [May 27] with an accompanying video interview shown below:
OLPC and Marvell collaboration has since significantly been strengthened as evidenced by (emphasis is mine):
One Laptop Gets $5.6M Grant From Marvell to Develop Next Generation Tablet Computer [Oct 4]
Negroponte says the deal, signed in the past week or so but not previously announced, runs through 2011. “Their money is a grant to the OLPC Foundation to develop a tablet or tablets based on their chip,” he says. “They’re going to put the whole system on a chip.”
… it will form the basis of what might be called an interim step, a tablet developed by Marvell (and also apparently modeled partly on its own Moby tablet for the education market) that is intended for children in the developed world. As such, it won’t be the machine OLPC wants to distribute in developing nations. … The Marvell tablet will also utilize the Android operating system, while the XO 3 will be based on Linux, among other differences, Negroponte says.
“The first one would definitely not have our brand. It’s a First World machine,” Negroponte says. The plans are for Marvell to develop this initial machine, in partnership with OEMs and a partner in education, and release it for sale sometime in 2011, he says.
Negroponte says a follow-on version, based more completely on OLPC’s designs, will hopefully be ready in 2012. “The second one…would have our brand on it, because it will be identified with and for the developing world,” he says.
OLPC’s Negroponte: Tablets must be a ‘constructionist’ medium [Sept 30]
Tablets are all about consumption, said Negroponte. “You could say that Apple makes peripherals for iTunes,” he said. In a developing world and educational environments, you need haptics and ways to make tablets constructive. “You can’t turn these kids into couch potatoes,” he said. “You learn by making.”
Cloud computing won’t fly where OLPC plays. “Clouds are fine for us, but there are no clouds over Ethiopia, Rwanda and Gaza,” he said.
Marvell co-founder talks technology in education, R&D [Oct 7]
On her relationship with Negroponte, Dai said she met him five years ago and they talked about moral causes and technology. Marvell had the mesh networking technology used in the original XO. “The priority was affordable technology for poor countries,” she said. “Nicholas set a bar. In many ways, he invented the e-book, netbook microcosm and form factor. The other piece was to make those devices affordable.”
What’s the OLPC’s role today? Dai said that in many respects the OLPC is a design shop—something Negroponte has noted after laying out plans for the next-generation XO. “OLPC sets a bar and the industry takes it and commercializes it,” she said. “It’s like the old days where Bell Labs would create and others would commercialize it.”
Marvell Delivers Vision of 21st Century Classroom Technology at NBC News’ ‘Education Nation’ Summit [Sept 27]
Marvell to Fund Next Generation Education Apps [Sept 27]
Marvell, one of the world’s largest chipmakers, announced today that it’s launching a competition to recognize and fund the most clever new education apps for classroom tablets. The challenge invites ambitious, intelligent software developers around the world to create apps that transform the way students learn. Three winners will share prize money totaling $100,000, along with access to Marvell’s considerable engineering resources for support and testing.
The $100K Challenge, unveiled at the NBC News’ Education Nation summit, is a part of Marvell’s Mobylize campaign, the company’s long-range commitment to mobilizing technology innovation, speeding education innovation and bringing to students everywhere the inexpensive yet powerful tools they need to learn, connect and collaborate in new ways.
The campaign and the $100K Challenge were inspired by Marvell’s new Moby tablet reference design. The classroom-friendly Moby tablet reference design is a high-performance, low-power device based on Marvell’s ARMADA™ application processor and Google’s Android™ operating system. It’s the platform for which developers enter the $100K Challenge will design their applications – and it’s perfect for the part. It’s equipped with 1080p HD, advanced 3D capabilities and full Flash internet. For developers, the Moby tablet reference design provides far-reaching possibilities. For students, it opens vast horizons, at a price school districts can afford.
Ms. Dai is the only woman co-founder of a major, public semiconductor company in the world, and has helped lead Marvell’s 15 years of growth from start-up to a current market capitalization of $12 Billion.
… Today, Marvell is the third-largest fabless semiconductor company in the world, and ships more than a billion chips per year. Marvell provides two out of every three chips used in storage media critical to the infrastructure of the Information Age; its broad portfolio of leading network and communications solutions and high performance, low-power chips have rapidly become the technology of choice behind a broad range of connected electronics — such as tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices. From a half dozen employees in 1995, Marvell has today more than 5,700 employees on four continents.
“It is my passion to work to bridge my two homelands – China and the U.S. – and try to promote cooperation and economic growth in both powerful nations, particularly in the areas of semiconductor, communications, education and green technologies,” said Weili Dai, Marvell’s Shanghai-born co-founder. “For that reason, I am very proud that the Governor chose to launch his Asia Trade Mission from Marvell’s Silicon Valley campus and then a few days later, visited our Shanghai design center. I am also proud that Shanghai government officials were able to join Governor Schwarzenegger in highlighting the exciting new developments at our Shanghai design center. It is an honor that reflects well on Marvell’s global leadership and growing industry influence.”
…
During his visit, the Governor toured demonstrations of Marvell’s latest communications, computing and consumer technology and presided over the dedication of the expansion plans at the company’s Shanghai Zhangjiang facilities, including the plans for a three-way research consortium between Marvell, China’s prestigious Tsinghua University and the University of California Berkeley. Additionally, Marvell announced its support of the Governor’s Executive Order to promote integration of advanced technologies in early education with a donation of eReaders and tablets to PS7 Middle School, a St. Hope Public School in Sacramento, California, and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Experimental Primary School in Shanghai, China.
In China, Marvell has operations in Shanghai, Beijing, Hefei and Shenzhen. Marvell’s Japan design center is in Tokyo; its South Korea operations are in Seoul. Marvell has strategic business relationships with the world’s largest telecom, mobile, and consumer electronics manufacturers in the region.
The screen technology in question comes from Pixel Qi as per ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD AND PIXEL QI SIGN CROSS-LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR SCREEN TECHNOLOGY [March 30]. The details here are:
OLPC receives full license to all Pixel Qi “3qi” screen technology, including 70+ patents in process and all current and future IP developed by Pixel Qi for multi-mode screens. Pixel Qi is leading the design of new screens for OLPC’s next-generation XO laptops. The agreement also calls for Pixel Qi to receive full license to the dual-mode (indoor and outdoor) display technology used in the XO.
“A huge barrier to getting computers to mass use in the developing world is limited access to electricity. Pixel Qi is designing new screens for OLPC that will keep laptops going even longer between recharges and excel in long-form reading while providing color and video,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child.
… Mary Lou Jepsen, founder and CEO of Pixel Qi, added, “OLPC’s focus on the need for low-cost, low-power devices led me to invent power-efficient LCD screens that are optimized for reading. Commercial tablets, notebook computers and smart phones have precisely the same needs. This is one of the few examples in which cutting-edge computer technology first deployed for developing nations benefits the developed world as well.”
Pixel Qi is actually an almost three years old start-up by Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of OLPC. She made a very early commitment to support OLPC further on as described in her post about the Next Generation OLPC Laptop [May 21, 2008]. It contains a HUGELY important remark:
In essence, the future of computing is all about the screens.
She was a very early pioneer of that approach for the XO-1 computer designed by OLPC. Mark Foster, who was the engineering chief there, described her particular contribution (besides her overall influence as CTO) in Mark J. Foster at Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium (Part 1) [October, 2006] as (emphasis is mine):
Another thing that’s really unusual about our machine is the LCD display. Our CTO, in fact, has created something that is really special. What this panel does is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen reflective color, I’ve seen transflective color, I’ve seen transmissive panels, I’ve never seen anything like this. This panel is truly a reflective monochrome panel. No backlight, you see a 1200X900 dot per inch seven and a half inch LCD. And it’s dense. At 200 DPI, we’re talking very close to laser print quality. Certainly from the original laser printers. It’s really nice.
And then, magically, you turn on the backlight, and you see color. Really unusual, pixel structure, it’s all 100% Mary Lou’s invention, and this is a really neat part of the machine. Completely new text, I’m really delighted to have this component in our box, because it gives all kinds of cool benefits that we can exploit. In particular, it’s inexpensive, straight, but also very low power consumption. And this ability to instantly go between a monochrome, a very high-res monochrome mode with a great reproduction of text or whatever it may be, and immediately flip to color mode when you want to is totally cool. I wish I had brought one with me today, and show you, my apologies that I did not.
But, it’s running, it works, and in fact, just this last week, we did some [xx] on the panel, that doubles it’s reflectivity. We actually measured, and the goal of double that reflectivity worked. So it’s a really neat trick, and again, there’s no other system out there like this. And it’s something that is invention purely of OLPC. Not that someone came and told us. Mary Lou created this, pushed it into the LCD manufacturers and made it real. Really neat stuff.
And Mark Foster is the person to judge that properly since himself has been introduced in the above Stanford EE talk as a true pioneer:
He’s led different projects in portable computing at Apple, at DEC [Digital], and at Zenith. He created the first notebook with Ethernet, which was the Z-Note [introduced on the same date as Windows 3.1, see the Z-Note press release [Apr 6, 1992]]. The first true sub notebook [with 8.5-inch (viewable) black-on-white VGA], which was the Z-lite [see the press release [Nov 16, 1992]]. And the thinnest notebook in the world at the time, which was the Hi-Note Ultra [From Digital].
Indeed, there were a couple of quite innovative ideas put into the XO-1 laptop as has been described by their inventor in A Conversation with Mary Lou Jepsen [Jan 17, 2008]
It defies conventional wisdom to put a display expert in charge of a laptop architecture, but since the cost of the screen in a laptop is more than $100, it was the main barrier of entry to building a low-cost laptop.
What I’ve found coming to this project is that people who design computers don’t know a lot about displays, and in fact by starting with the display and designing the computer kind of backwards, rather than just slapping a display onto a motherboard, we can design a whole new architecture.
The architecture we’ve created is very powerful, not just for low-cost laptops, but for high-end laptops as well.
… If you look at what’s been happening in computers for the past 40 years, it’s been about more power, more megahertz, more MIPS. As a result, we’ve had huge applications and operating systems. Instead, at OLPC we focused on an entirely different kind of solution space. We focused on low power consumption, no hard drive, no moving parts, built-in networking, and sunlight-readable screens.
… we had to design a laptop that was also the infrastructure. It has mesh networking, which is the last mile, 10 miles, 100-mile Internet solution. The solar repeaters and active antennas that we’ve added into the mix cost about $10 a piece and help to relay the Internet. If one laptop in a village is connected to the Internet, they all are.
Yes, it might be just a trickle, a low-bandwidth connection from the Internet to the laptop, but between the laptops is a high-bandwidth connection through the mesh network. We use 802.11s, which is the standard for mesh.
… We use an AMD chipset, the LX-700, which allows you to turn the CPU on and off in a hundredth of a second. It’s not noticeable to the users whether the motherboard is on or off because the moment they hit the keyboard or get a Skype phone call or what have you, the CPU and motherboard are back up and running.
That also allows us to run the mesh at extremely low power: 400 milliwatts, compared with my ThinkPad laptop, which uses approximately 10 watts just to run Wi-Fi.
… We had to get rid of the hard disk, because not only is it the second most expensive component in a laptop after the screen, but it’s also a huge power hog, and the number one cause of hardware failures is hard disk failure. That’s three strikes against it. Instead, we used flash memory, which people are starting to use.
… I should also talk about the low-power display. We did something I’ve been doing for a long time in different kinds of display technology: putting memory directly into the display itself. You can’t do that with amorphous silicon, which is the standard transistor process used in LCD. To keep costs to a minimum, I used a standard process for the screen. But you can add memory in the timing controller. That means the screen can stay on while the rest of the motherboard or the chipset is off.
Why would you want to do that? It turns out that most of the time you’re using a laptop or a desktop, the CPU isn’t really doing much, even while it’s running at multiple hundreds of megahertz. Right now I’m staring at my laptop. Not a single pixel on my screen is moving. What’s the CPU doing on? What’s the motherboard doing on? The way to get to low power—the big secret—is to turn stuff off that you’re not using. But nobody has ever made a laptop with a screen that self-refreshes. You really do have to keep flipping the liquid crystal molecule; they like AC fields. The liquid crystal molecules fall apart in DC. You need to keep only two images in memory for that, and you can keep the screen on all day long.
We also put a tiny ARM core in our Wi-Fi chip. We used the Marvell chip because it’s the only Wi-Fi chip with a tiny ARM core in it, which means Wi-Fi can also stay up and running while the CPU is off.
… I came up with this idea for a sunlight-readable screen by starting with a transflective process, which was used briefly on cellphones but wasn’t very readable inside or outside (it was very dim) and so was dropped from most products. What I did differently was to put color filters over the transmissive part of the pixel only, instead of the mirror part of the pixel, and I used—get this—a colorless color filter over the rest of the pixel as a spacer.
In a transflective display, part of the pixel is reflective and part of it is transmissive. People think of it as kind of the worst of both worlds, so it hasn’t been that popular. Again, these displays are considered dim, high power, and not that readable.
Each big LCD fab had developed a transflective process, so, I thought, why not use this process and then change the pixel layout by putting a little sliver of a color filter (red, green, or blue) over part of each pixel and then changing the bulk layout of the pixel as well? For best compatibility with minimal image-generation systems, I used diagonal stripes of color so that we would get square-root-of-3 resolution in X and Y in color mode, when compared with the black-and-white (grayscale) resolution. You see, each pixel is black-and-white (grayscale) in reflection and shows a single color in transmission (red, green, or blue when the backlight is on). Strictly speaking, therefore, you get one-third the resolution in color. The human visual system isn’t digital, however. It’s analog and biological, and through this pixel layout we get higher perceived resolution—about 800 by 600 in color. You get all this with a low-cost and low-power TTL (transistor-transistor logic) interface that can be used because the true pixel count is so low. I’m just making the pixels do double or triple duty.
Soon after this interview appeared on ACM Queue Mary Lou Jepsen made the announcement that Higher resolution than we thought – the XO laptop screen [May 28, 2008]
The XO screen has been shown to be higher resolution than we thought. Michiel Klompenhouwer from Philips Research says the color resolution is effectively 984×738, even though strictly speaking straight division indicates color resolution of 692×520 (this is 1/3 of 1200×900 our black&white resolution). We have been saying for some time that the resolution is about 800×600, but his new study shows a more exact way of measuring perceived resolution. Michiel presented an analysis of our screen and other display pixel layouts at the Society for Information Display Annual Meeting this week in Los Angeles in a talk entitled “Comparing the Effective Resolution of Various RGB Subpixel Layouts” SID08.
Because of that XO design she became a true ICT industry celebrity which is well expressed by the New Statesman in The NS Profile: Mary Lou Jepsen [April 30, 2009]
The XO is the cheapest, least power-hungry notebook computer ever produced, a device that may eventually prove one of the most important educational tools of its time – and for which last year Time magazine named Jepsen one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Along the way, her design sparked a mainstream computing revolution. Jepsen’s primary intention was to “innovate at the bottom of the pyramid”, creating a simple computer for educational use in impoverished areas. But it turned out that computer users in industrialised countries also wanted inexpensive, environmentally friendly laptops. The netbook was born. Just two years after the XO was first released, nearly every major PC brand is selling an inexpensive, low-performance mini-laptop, and analysts predict sales will have reached 50 million by the end of the year. “Every time I meet with the CEO of a big laptop company, they tell me they ‘studied’ my design,” Jepsen has said.
While some could argue that her effort had nothing to do with the birth of netbooks (attributed to Asustek alone) the fact is that Taiwanese companies were intrigued by the idea of a low-cost PC from her 2005 and 2006 attempts with different Taiwanese manufacturers to collaborate. As was described by Ministry of Information (Taiwan) article Small Laptop, Big Splash [April 1, 2008]:
In December 2005, Barry Lam, chairman of Quanta Computer, agreed to manufacture the XO-1. Then, in April 2006, a second Taiwan technology group, Chi Mei Optoelectronics, joined at the urging of the conglomerate’s octogenarian founder and philanthropist, Shi Wen-lung.
… the head of the project at Quanta is Dandy Hsu, general manager and vice president of the company’s Educational Product Business Unit and one of two OLPC board members in Taiwan.
Hsu says bringing the XO-1 to mass production took Quanta nearly two years–an eternity by original design manufacturing /original equipment manufacturing (ODM/OEM) standards.
… Obviously, the XO-1 wasn’t a typical laptop project. “Normally, when we design a commercial notebook, we have Microsoft’s Windows or other software that will run on the device,” Hsu explains. Usually hardware engineers design commercial laptops around the requirements of the marketplace’s dominant operating systems (OS) and application program interfaces (API), then use these for testing as the design work proceeds.
Software was not available for the XO-1 because it was being developed simultaneously by OLPC, which oversaw a team of volunteer engineers designing a Linux-based OS for the XO-1 and writing code for its open source application programs.
… Engineers faced other surprises. In March 2006, when the XO-1 motherboards were ready for testing, OLPC held a “country conference,” which was attended by “delegates” from the governments that intended to purchase the machine. The result was a decision to upgrade the XO-1 with a more powerful CPU. This was no minor modification.
“Change the CPU and you’re talking about a completely new machine,” Hsu says.
Then, later in March, came devastating news. Quanta had recently completed the sale of its subsidiary, Quanta Display, and new owner AU Optronics decided not to manufacture the XO-1 screen, the most critical component of the project.
The XO-1 appeared dead. OLPC’s chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, disappointed and exhausted from more than a year of intense work for OLPC, left Taiwan for home. Hours later, she was near death as well, having gone into adrenal [mellékvese] failure on the flight to Boston.
In April 2006, two weeks after her illness, Jepsen returned to Taiwan and approached the Chi Mei Group, a Tainan-based conglomerate, to ask if it would manufacture the XO-1’s display.
“Mary Lou is one of the heroes of this project–a selfless, beautiful thing,” says Scott Soong of Chi Mei subsidiary Chi Lin Technology. Soong is the other OLPC board member in Taiwan, along with Quanta’s Dandy Hsu.
… By August 2006, Chi Lin Technology had a working prototype of the XO-1’s dual-mode screen. Jepsen says that without Scott Soong, “the display would not exist. He found ways around the seemingly impassable roadblocks during the design and production process.”
“In the concept, the engineering … we did that fairly quickly; then it was tweaking and tweaking and tweaking,” Soong says.
Later, Chi Mei assembled the Taiwan-made display components at its LCD factories in China.
Another Chi Mei contribution is the plastic housing, the fabulously cheerful green and white material that makes the XO-1 so recognizable.
Summing up, Soong says, “I’ll be honest with you. What Chi Mei has done is build a world-class display nearly at cost. This is not just another project for us. Nobody wanted to let this project down. Everybody went above and beyond to ensure success.”
“That is true for Quanta, and that is true for us,” he says. “And true for all of the other partners.”
From this chronology it is quite visible that OLPC XO-1 had ample publicity for notebook manufacturers of Taiwan to pick the idea, but in not so innovative way (they could not do that either because of intellectual property rights protection). Read the local Taiwanese news article of that time High Time for Low-priced Laptops [Nov 17, 2007] to understand the launch time situation for XO, Asus EeePC, and Intel Classmate (the latter also getting the lead from the OLPC idea).
Follow-up: Pixel Qi and CPT alliance for sunlight readability [Dec 22, 2010]
Follow-up: Pixel Qi’s first big name device manufacturing partner is the extremely ambitious ZTE [Feb 15, 2011]
For the even more industry paradigm changing output from Mary Lou Jepsen’s own company, Pixel Qi, read the following posts in her blog (the posts are in backward chronology):
- DIY Pixel Qi screens – available now! [July 1, 2010]
- Computex Update – Pixel Qi [June 2, 2010]
- Pixel Qi receives SID Display of the Year Award! [May 25, 2010]
- Pixel Qi wins top IEEE award! [April 28, 2010]
- Pilots & Production plus a Nomination [Feb 1, 2010]
- CES [Jan 4, 2010]
- Pixel Qi Starting Production [Dec 7, 2009]
- Screens in Office Lighting, Part 2 [Nov 22, 2009]
- Most screens hard to read on bright office light [Nov 21, 2009]
- Pixel Qi Late? [Oct 28, 2009]
- Pixel Qi Screens debuting in Tablets [Oct 17, 2009]
- Comparing the Pixel Qi screen to others [Aug 26, 2009]
- Pixel Qi is Hiring! [July 29, 2009]
- More videos of our new screen [June 4, 2009]
- Josh Quittner’s Blog post [June 4, 2009]
- Charbax posts some videos of our screens [June 2, 2009]
- Short (very short) video of the screen [June 2, 2009]
- answering the blog [June 1, 2009]
- First pictures of Pixel Qi 3qi screen [May 28, 2009]
- Our first screens out of the fab! [May 24, 2009]
- Samples Due Soon [Apr 23, 2009]
- Netbook and Ebook blur lines [March 16, 2009]
- Product Freeze [Feb 2, 2009]
- Thanksgiving Update from Pixel Qi [Nov 29, 2008]
- Pixel Qi is Hiring [June 6, 2008]
- Upcoming Public Appearances [Apr 16, 2008]
- Traveling… [Apr 16, 2008]
- Pixel Qi is One Month Old [on Feb 2, 2008] [Apr 16, 2008]
Windows 7 tablets/slates with Oak Trail Atom SoC in December
Intel “is aiming to mass produce its Oak Trail platform for its Sleek Netbook segment targeting the tablet PC market in December 2010. The Oak Trail platform is a combination of Intel’s Lincroft (Atom Z6xx series) processor with Whitney Point chipset.”
See: Intel reveals Chief River platform for notebooks [Digitimes, Nov 1].
- Update: Intel starts mass producing Oak Trail platform [Nov 24]
… specifically for tablet PCs, with the combination of Atom Z670 processor and SM35 chipset the initial product, according to industry sources.
The Oak Trail platform will sell at about US$25 with MeeGo, and the price for Oak Trail and Microsoft’s Windows 7 will be higher.
This notification given to Intel manufacturing partners in Taiwan might remove the long-standing barrier for Microsoft to introduce its long awaited Windows 7 slates to the market as early as in the second half of November, with retail availability in December. This would be even more than that since on November 20th the company will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Windows. Steve Ballmer might also have an additional, big case for celebration as whatever he has been telling in the last months there had been no sufficient evidence to back his claims, see: Windows slates in the coming months? Not much seen yet [July 13 – Oct 6, 2010]. And for people interested in technical details it has been well known all along that the Moorestown Atom chip (Atom Z6xx series) has not been developed to run the prime Windows software so Microsoft should wait for arrival of a Windows 7 capable version, code-named Oak Trail and originally promised for early 2011 availability only. See: Intel SoC for Cloud Clients [June 27 – Aug 23].
What kind of Windows 7 tablet/slate might soon arrive with Oak Trail availability? Will such a “sleek netbook” device (as per Intel’s new terminology) be able to compete with Apple’s highly successful iPad or even surpass that in capabilities. Before those devices are announced no definite answers could be given. Nevertheless there is sufficient evidence already that there could be very big surprises in that regard.
Here is Dell Inspiron Duo flipping tablet/netbook device first shown on the Intel Developer Forum in September:
Update: Dell is definitely the #1 Microsoft ally now as evidenced by Michael Dell: Developing Windows smartphones ‘easier’ than Android [Nov 2]
More information:
– Hybrid Dell Inspiron Duo Tablet : A Netbook and A Tablet Device [Sept 19]
– Dell’s Atom-powered Inspiron Duo: 10-inch netbook / tablet hybrid with a crazy swivel (update: more video and detailed press photo!) [Sept 14]
– Dell to Reinvigorate Its Brand Name with New Campaign [Oct 21]
The marketing campaign will include television spots, due to start November 6, and print ads about a week later. According to the company, the campaign would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Even Intel Free Press, a 3 weeks only Intel tech news initiative is drawing attention to it by a title telling a lot – Free Shot: Looking for Tablets this Holiday Season? [Oct 8]:
This is the first year when tablet computers have a chance of hitting a relative’s top 10 wish list for the holidays. In addition to the widely popular iPad, several new touch screen tablets are rumored to be coming before the end of the year, including the hybrid Dell Inspiron Duo tablet-netbook. Moving away from a physical keyboard and familiar computing experience might scare away many people, but Dell seems to have found a nice middle ground. This video shows how the 10-inch touch screen flips transforming the tablet slate into a traditional netbook with keyboard.
Look at the video and you will be more than convinced.
There is also an explicit confirmation from Microsoft in Ballmer: Windows 7 tablets to be seen by Christmas [Oct 5]:
A spokesperson said Microsoft can confirm three Windows 7 slates: one from Hanvon in China, Toshiba’s Libretto W100 (which doesn’t really count because it’s a limited-quantity prototype) and the Dell Inspiron Duo Tablet, which Dell has said will be available later this year.
We can already see from this that there will be other vendors with Windows 7 slates/tablets. There is more evidence to support that:
– Intel: Our Tablet Design Momentum Is Very Strong [Oct 13]
– Acer tablet PC line launching on November 23rd, priced from $299 to $699 [Oct 27]
– Acer set to unveil multiple tablets on Nov. 23 [Oct 29]
– Acer first tablet PC aimed at fulfilling telecom carrier demand [Oct 29]
– Asustek details tablet PC plans [Oct 29]
– Latest Update On ASUS Tablets – 7-Inch to 12-Inch Range [Oct 29]
Furthermore Intel has already started to mount a strong market attack:
– via their own CEO at the current earnings conference call with: Intel CEO praises iPad, throws down gauntlet [Oct 12]
– via the well-known market research company iSuppli explicitly stating: Intel Aims to Enter Tablet Market With Oak Trail Processor [Oct 19]
– via their own Intel Free Press with an extensive article about Reports of Netbook’s Death Greatly Exaggerated, Experts Say [Oct 26]
And this is all before the 25th anniversary of Windows! Watch the news!
Marvell ARMADA beats Qualcomm Snapdragon, NVIDIA Tegra and Samsung/Apple Hummingbird in the SoC market [again]
Follow-ups: – Marvell SoCs to win both Microsoft and Nokia for Windows Phone and Windows 8 platforms (after the Kinect success) [Feb 1, 2012]
– First real chances for Marvell on the tablet and smartphone fronts [Aug 21 – Sept 25, 2011]
While in the last 2 years Qualcomm Snapdragon, then NVIDIA Tegra and Samsung/Apple Hummingbird (Samsung’s S5PC110 and Apple’s A4 via Intrinsity’s acquisition) got by far the biggest public attention in the System-on-a-Chip (SoC) space it has been Marvell’s ARMADA the real winner all along.
Follow-up: Marvell to capitalize on BRIC market with the Moby tablet [Feb 3, 2011]
Follow-up: Kinoma is now the marvellous software owned by Marvell [Feb 15, 2011]
Follow-up: ASUS, China Mobile and Marvell join hands in the OPhone ecosystem effort for “Blue Ocean” dominance [March 8, 2011]
Follow-up: High expectations on Marvell’s opportunities with China Mobile [May 28, 2011]
Update [Jan 17, 2011]: Report: iPad 2 to use fast graphics chip [Jan 17, 2011] (emphasis is mine)
The iPad 2 will sport powerful, new graphics hardware, along with a higher-resolution display, according to a report.
That graphics chip would be Imagination’s SGX543, according to Apple Insider.
If this rumor is on the money, it is, indeed, a potent graphics technology. Imagination describes the POWERVR SGX543MP as allowing “up to 16 cores…in a high-performance, multiprocessor graphics solution without performance or silicon area compromises.” This graphics tech would be used in conjunction with a dual-core ARM processor, as CNET previously reported.
And Apple’s next-gen iPhone 5 would also feature this chip design–the so-called Apple A5 processor.
“This makes sense,” said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at the Linley Group, a chip consulting firm. “The A5 processor must have at least dual Cortex-A9 CPUs (central processing units) to be competitive with [Nvidia’s] Tegra 2 and other current smartphone CPUs,” Gwennap said in response to an e-mail query. The Cortex-A9 is a design being used by most major ARM chip suppliers, such as Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Nvidia.
Gwennap continued. “The single-core SGX543 does not have enough graphics performance to keep up with Tegra 2, but a dual-core SGX543 should be within the same range. Even a dual-core SGX543 would fall well behind the graphics performance of Marvell’s new Armada 628, which should be in phones in 2H11,” he said. (Imagination also has the SGX545.)
Addition [later]: Marvell’s tri-core ARM chip has near-PS3-level graphics [Sept 2010], since Sony Playstation 3 GPU has 250 million triangles per second performance vs. ARMADA 628’s 200 MT/s.
Update [Nov 4]: Marvell ARMADA with sun readable and unbreakable Pixel Qi screen, and target [mass] manufacturing cost of $75 on this blog [Nov 4]
Update [Nov 2]: Sehat Sutardja: An Engineering Marvell by IEEE Spectrum [Nov 2, in print Oct 27 but with the title of Marvell Inside] is describing the extremely deep electronic engineering mentality lead with its CEO as the secret recipe for success from the very beginning:
Sehat already had plans for the first product: a better read channel for disk drives. It sounds incredibly specialized and it is, but it’s also one of the drive’s key components. The read channel takes the analog signal coming from the magnetic head as it scans the disk, converts the noisy signal to digital, and puts that information out onto the bus that will take it to the computer. Existing read channels used a bipolar transistor on a complementary-metal-oxide semiconductor substrate (BiCMOS), but Sehat planned to use only CMOS. That way the channels could be manufactured by a chip foundry like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., so Marvell wouldn’t have to build its own fab. Using CMOS also meant that the device would consume less power. This would, however, present an engineering challenge: Existing CMOS read-channel designs were much slower than BiCMOS.
… they convinced Seagate Technology to take a chance. Ken Burns, an executive at Seagate, told them that the company’s next-generation drive would need a read channel at 240 Mb/s—could Marvell deliver? … They told Burns yes. In less than three months the Marvell team hit the 240-Mb/s mark, and Seagate became Marvell’s first customer. … Today, in terms of units sold, Marvell has about 60 percent of the market for hard drive systems-on-a-chip.
“This little start-up, with one product line, put Texas Instruments out of the read-channel business,” Ohr [an analyst with Gartner] says.
Now we have a new ARMADA SoC processor product from Marvell which is making that lead even more evident:
Marvell Raises Technology Bar Again with World’s First 1.5 GHz Tri-Core Processor Delivering Dual Stream 1080p 3D Video for Smartphones and Tablets [Sept 23] – Game Changer: Ultra-low power, ultra-high performance ARMADA three-core processor first to feature 3D graphics performance with quad unified shaders for 200 million triangles per second delivered on mobile devices
Marvell ARMADA 628 has indeed an impressive set of features on a single die. To quote from the press release (emphasis is mine):
Key Features
- World’s first “tri-core” application processor
– Up to 1.5 GHz for the two main cores and 624 MHz for the third low power core
– “Heterogeneous multiprocessing” with “hardware-based Cache Coherence”
– 1 MB System Level 2 Cache
– Platform leading multimedia capabilities, including support for both WMMX2 and NEON acceleration; and a highly optimized pipelined VFPv3 floating point engine
– Member of the ARMADA family of processors for easy software porting- 1080p dual stream 3D video applications (30 FPS, multi-format)
- Ultimate 3D graphics performance with quad unified shaders for 200 million triangles per second (MT/s)
- High performance, integrated image signal processor (ISP)
- Ability to project images on multiple simultaneous displays
– 2 LCDs
– 1 HDMI
– 1 advanced EPD [like the ones used in E-Ink based e-readers, e.g. Amazon Kindle] controller- Peripherals support: USB 3.0 Superspeed Client, MIPI CSI, MIPI DSI, HDMI with integrated PHY, UniPro, Slimbus, SPMI
Addition [later]: Marvell’s tri-core ARM chip has near-PS3-level graphics [Sept 2010], since Sony Playstation 3 GPU has 250 million triangles per second performance vs. ARMADA 628’s 200 MT/s.
We should emphasize two additional facts from the press release:
The new ARMADA 628 tri-core processor incorporates a number of advanced processing and power management features. The tri-core design integrates two high performance symmetric multiprocessing cores and a third core optimized for ultra low-power. The third core is designed to support routine user tasks and acts as a system management processor to monitor and dynamically scale power and performance. The tri-core architecture provides superior performance and lower power over dual-core designs while maintaining industry compatibility and leadership – ensuring a richer, faster and smoother experience than any other ARM-based processor available today.
… In addition to the tri-core CPU, there are six additional processing engines to support stunning 3D graphics, 1080p video encode/decode, ultra high fidelity audio, advanced cryptography, and digital photo data processing – for a total of nine dedicated core functions.
Additional information from Linley Gwennap‘s Marvell Debuts Tricore Architecture [Sept 23] infonugget: The chip is manufactured in 40 nm geometry [note, this is the first such mobile processor from Marvell publicly announced], all three processors use Marvell’s high-end Sheeva PJ4 design, the third CPU uses however a different circuit layout, based on the same synthesizable core, but optimized for lower speed and lower power, the new chip is fully compatible with ARM’s Neon instruction set (unlike the previous versions of the PJ4), the 3D graphics performance [200 MT/s] is more than four times of the current high-end ARMADA 610 [45 MT/s], and the introduction of an optimized third CPU is an innovative feature which should deliver better battery life than a dual-CPU chip that simply shuts down one CPU. According to Linley Gwennap:
To maximize battery life, the processor uses the smaller CPU most of the time, but it can shift to the powerful dual CPUs when maximum performance is required. The new Marvell processor is currently sampling and due to enter production next March.
With the current availability of the samples to the customers it is “just” the time needed to create the high-volume, consumer market products for the mass availability. Because the ARMADA 628 is a member of a whole family of processors designed for easy software porting it is not a great engineering challenge to develop the new devices based on this new and “marvelous” SoC. Hopefully the device vendors are also well ahead in their business development activities for ultra-low power but at the same time ultra-high performance handheld products in the smartphone and tablet space. If not yet then they will have enough market experience for early next year when all the supply (in addition to the hopefully mass-produced by that time ARMADA 628 SoC) and distribution arrangements could be organised by them.
How the competition is standing up against this leadership offering? Badly, since there is nothing comparable to ARMADA 628 in a 1-2 years timeframe ahaead of us:
Qualcomm: 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon devices to arrive at end of 2011, 1.2GHz in Q1 [Sept 8]
Qualcomm 1.5GHz Snapdragon due end of 2011, not Q1 [Sept 8]
NVIDIA CEO: Tegra 3 almost done, Tegra 4 on the way, expect a new Tegra annually [Sept 21]
NVIDIA Finds Its Rhythm: Tegra 3 Imminent with Annual Updates [Sept 21]
which titles may sound quite competitive but in fact these are just mumblings by their desparate CEO as evidenced by these two videos from an unrelated press conference (obviously the CEO was just using the opportunity to “fend-off” the upcoming annoucement known to him already):
– NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsen Huang talks about Tegra [Sept 21], with a very low quality voice recorded by someone in the audience
– the other one, with a better voice record, embedded in the above mentioned NVIDIA Finds Its Rhythm: Tegra 3 Imminent with Annual Updates article which is making it obvious that the only real specific what was said was:
Tegra 2 is just our first entry (into the mobile market), Tegra 3 is almost done, Tegra 4 is being built. Just think in the context of the NVIDIA rhythm. Every single year, there will be a new Tegra.
Nothing more!
Finally regarding comparable high SoC processor plans from Samsung/Intrinsity[Apple] combo there is no new information at all. The Hummingbird chip (Samsung’s S5PC110 and Apple’s A4) is even no match to the #2 (after ARMADA 628) Qualcomm 1.2 GHz dual-core Snapdragon, also in the sampling phase right now.
When considering the competition one should also consider that Marvell has even high-impact end-customer initiatives as parts of its long-term strategy:
– Moby for education/learning and healthcare/medical (see also their $75 tablet project with Pixel Qi and OLPC, mentioned before, as the natural evolution for Moby)
Follow-up: Marvell to capitalize on BRIC market with the Moby tablet [Feb 3, 2011]
– Plug Computer with only 2 watts of power dissipation (complete for the below spec) for typical applications such as a high performance home server, multimedia server, web proxy etc. The latest CES 2011 release [Jan 5, 2011] is stating even more:
Marvell's Plug Computer 3.0 announced on CES 2011 with a 2 GHz ARMADA™ 300 processor, Embedded Wi-Fi, Bluetooth enabled, 512MB flash, 512MB DDR2, 1.8 inch HD, 1 USB 2.0, 1 Mini USB, 1 10/100/1000 (Gigabit) Ethernet, and SDIO slot.
From streaming the latest winter vacation video to a connected TV in the bedroom, to enjoying favorite music on a Wi-Fi enabled receiver in the living room, Plug Computer 3.0 makes enjoying media on intelligent devices throughout the home easier and on-the-go more enjoyable than before.
The release of Plug Computer 3.0 opens up additional applications and usage in key new markets: Smart Grid, Home Automation, Medical Monitoring, Multimedia Content Sharing, Security and Access Control, Industrial Automation, Agricultural, Mesh and Grid Computing.
More information
* Quite important note for the information given above and below: Marvell has developed and continuing to develop two types of synthesizable cores: PJ1 and PJ4. Unfortunately there is no public information on that except the appearance in various processor products. These cores allow different kinds of core optimisations (an example is the 3d CPU vs dual high-peformance ones in ARMADA 628) and various ARM Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) implementations (as seen below in our product catalogue references). This is a highly competitive differentiator for Marvell.
Update: the PJ1 was also called 88SV331x, and the codename for it “MOHAWK”
- on Marvell by Marvell: A Next Generation Semiconductor Company – History of Marvell CPUs – ARMADA* [overview of the current offerings, not updated yet with ARMADA 628] – Awards
- Marvell Unveils High-Speed CPUs for the Enterprise [Apr 28, 2008]: the “Discovery Innovation Series” MV7800 type embedded processors introduced in single core versions with frequency of 0.6 – 1.2 GHz and dual core versions with frequency of 0.8 – 1.0 GHz. A month later (see the next item) it is disclosed that the high-speed CPUs are the Sheeva PJ1* variants.
- Marvell Sheeva Embedded CPU Technology Set to Drive Next Generation of Consumer, Mobile and Enterprise Applications [June 2, 2008], Marvell Introduces SoCs to Boost Digital Home Gateway and PC Performance: [June 2, 2008]: Sheeva PJ1*-based “Kirkwood series” 88F6000 SoCs announced as samples available. “Marvell’s new SoCs will initially come in three versions, the 88F6180, 88F6192 and the 88F6281, with the 88F6281 capable at running of speeds up to 2 GHz, while consuming an ultra-low sub 2 Watts of power.”
- The Untold Story of Marvellʼs Processor Development, by Linley Gwennap, Principal Analyst [Aug 2008]
- Marvell offers their ideas on design for low power [Oct 10, 2008]
- Marvell Unleashes Powerful New Applications Processor for Mass-Market Digital Consumer Devices [Jan 8, 2009]: PXA168 as the high member of the current, upto 1.2 GHz Sheeva PJ1*-based ARMADA 100 series announced as “sampling now”.
- ARM SoC launched with Linux support [Jan 8, 2009] – this article gives a good overview of the Sheeva PJ1* products from the first “Discovery Innovation Series” MV7800 type embedded processors introduced in May 2008, then the “Kirkwood series” 88F6000 SoCs, also for the embedded market in June 2008, and then to the PXA168 application processor of January’09, later renamed ARMADA 168.
- Marvell Empowers Mass Market TD-SCDMA OPhones with PXA920 Chipset [Sept 8, 2009]: the introduction of Marvell’s one of the most strategic SoC products, the integrated (on a single die) 2.75G (EDGE), 3G (TD-SCDMA) and 3.5G (TD-HSDPA and TD-HSUPA) communication processor with an upto 0.832 GHz Sheeva PJ1* core, the PXA920 for the Chinese market. This got also another name later, Pantheon. It is quite important to realize the strategic intent behind this product, quoting the real customer behind:
“We believe that the PXA920 solution will help us realize China Mobile’s vision of sub-1000 RMB [~$150, unsubsidized] TD OPhones in the near future,” said Bill Huang general manager of China Mobile Research Institute. “Marvell has worked with us from the start of the PXA920 program and we are excited by the rapid progress we have made towards realizing this milestone. China Mobile will work closely with Marvell and handset eco-system partners to deploy the PXA920 and we look forward to the rapid launch of next generation TD-SCDMA OPhones based on the Marvell PXA920.”
Update: That opportunity was realized only 2 years later. See:First real chances for Marvell on the tablet and smartphone fronts [Aug 21, 2011]
- New Marvell HD Media Processor System-on-a-Chip Brings Award-Winning Qdeo Processing to Next-Generation Consumer Electronics Devices [Sept 16] : the introduction of 88DE3010 High Definition (HD) Media Processor System-on-a-Chip (SoC) with two Sheeva PJ1* cores at up to 1.2 GHz, a month later also getting a new name, ARMADA 1000. This was also the last Sheeva PJ1* variety SoC introduced so far.
- Marvell Launches ARMADA – New Application Processors for Next Generation Mobile Computing and Intelligent Connected Devices [Oct 19, 2009]: rebranding of Sheeva based products and introducing the first Sheeva PJ4*-based product in the family, the ARMADA 510 having a frequency of 1.2 GHz and with “sampling to customers this quarter”. With this Marvell introduced ARM v6 / ARM v7 capability and also was one of the industry’s first running ARM v7 instruction set. This was also an important milestone for Marvell’s new Sheeva-based product strategy (emphasis is mine):
The ARMADA family of application processors sets a new standard by offering CPU cores with PC-class performance, support for Adobe Flash technology and Blu-ray functionality. Additional features include complete broadband connectivity for the next wave of innovative electronics, spanning price points from low cost consumer gadgets all the way to premium performance devices. Customer adoption has been rapid: to date, Marvell ARMADA application processors have won more than 50 design wins.
- On ARMADA by Anand Lal Shimpi: Marvell’s ARMADA: Custom Designed ARM SoCs Break 1GHz [Oct 19, 2009] — please note that the only objection raised here, “The biggest issue I can see with Marvell’s PJ4 is that it doesn’t support ARM’s NEON SIMDfp instruction set” is not existing any more with ARMADA 628.
- Marvell Introduces ARMADA 300 — Setting New Embedded Computing Performance Standards [Dec 16, 2009]: the latest members of the Sheeva PJ1*-based embedded “Kirkwood” series processors, the 88F6282 and 88F6283 are introduced as the ARMADA 300/310SoCs. The high-performance ARMADA 300 with frequency of 1.6 – 2.0 GHz, low power ARMADA 310 with frequency of 0.8 GHz and 1.0 GHz. Quoting the press release:
The ARMADA 300 series offers more than 2.0 GHz processing horsepower in a sub 2W power envelope [it is even less for the ARMADA 310: “under normal load, this device operates on average in less than one watt power consumption envelope” said Sahat Sutardja, Marvell’s CEO at the March 4, 2010 Earnings Call] for the entire System on Chip – a level of performance never before seen with this class of processor – and the flexibility, interfaces and price points that fit the needs of today’s digital economy.
- Marvell Changes the Game Again – New ARMADA 610 Application Processor First to Bring 1080p Full-HD Encode and Decode and 3D Multimedia Performance to Mobile Connected Devices [Jan 5, 2010]: the introduction of the second Sheeva PJ4*-based member of the ARMADA family. The ARMADA 610 has been designed for mobility, features a 1 GHz CPU, has an integrated 3D engine which renders 45M triangles-per-second (via a complete floating point pipeline and unified vertex and fragment/pixel shading) for an immersive gameplay experience with the ability to drive the latest in 3D enabled user interfaces, a lot of integrated peripheral controller on the same die etc. It is targeted at “eReader, Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), tablets, smartbook/netbooks, connected portable media players, smartphones, and new personal information appliances.” Subsequently it was “designed to use extremely low power while maintaining high processing performance [2.42 DMIPS/MHz] and attractive price points for manufacturers.” It was “currently sampling to early customers.”
- Marvell Announces Another Breakthrough in Chip Technology: World’s First Quadruple Core Processor for ARM Instruction Set [Jan 6, 2010] (emphasis is mine):
Based on the same CPU architecture as the Marvell® ARMADA™ 500 and 600 processor series, Marvell’s quadcore implementation can deliver gigahertz-plus processing per core and is designed for customer-specific products such as mass consumer market and high volume gaming applications.
“Introducing our quadcore technology to the world represents a pivotal moment in CPU development for the consumer electronics industry,” said Ms. Weili Dai, Marvell’s Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of Marvell Semiconductor, Inc.’s Consumer and Computing Business Unit. “Today’s media-rich consumer applications are already pushing the limits. By making quadcore capabilities available to our customers we will enable the newest generation of cutting edge devices that consumers will always demand — more horsepower, higher performance, better battery life, and more attractive price points than ever before for mass consumer market adoption.”
Marvell has a long history of delivering multicore technology to customers for use in a broad variety of applications ranging from pachinko machines, printers, gaming, networking, gateways, all the way up to computing-intensive enterprise applications. This announcement of the first implementation of quadcore technology for the ARM ecosystem further demonstrates Marvell’s ability to deliver high performance, flexible technology that meets the silicon requirements of numerous tier-one customers, regardless of the end application.
“With the introduction of the ARMADA line of processors, we see the wide variety of devices that Marvell’s application processors can power,” said Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst for the Enderle Group. “Before ARMADA, the ARM ecosystem was thought to be limited by performance barriers. Now, with this announcement of its quadcore technology, Marvell is showing the world the ARM ecosystem’s true potential while cementing its position among the leaders in advanced CPU development for mass market consumer applications.”
Marvell’s quadcore solution is designed to meet customer specific requirements for mass consumer market opportunities. For more information about Marvell quadcore technologies please visit www.marvell.com or contact a sales representative.
- Marvell Unveils 1.6GHz Quad-Core ARMADA XP Platform for Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing Applications [Nov 8] (emphasis is mine):
… the Company will demonstrate its quad-core processing, enterprise-class cloud computing platform, Marvell® ARMADA™ XP (Extreme Performance). The ARMADA XP is the fastest ARM processor available on the market today for enterprise class applications. The new platform integrates four Marvell designed ARM compliant 1.6GHz CPU cores along with a host of I/O peripherals to offer one of the highest levels of integration in the industry. By employing advanced design methodology and process technology, the ARMADA XP is optimized to consume strikingly low power at 1.6GHz, delivering the best performance per watt [16,600 DMIPS performance at less than 10 watts see below in the “Key Features” section] to empower emerging cloud computing applications ranging from high performance networking and web servers to high volume home server products like Network Attached Storage (NAS) and media servers.
Marvell’s introduction of a powerful solution for enterprise-class cloud computing applications is a very important milestone in the mobile Internet revolution—cloud computing mobile servers like those powered by the ARMADA XP are the key link in what I envision to be a seamless, unified ecosystem of mobile connected devices, information appliances and smart ‘furnishings,'” said Weili Dai, Co-Founder of Marvell. “Marvell’s leadership in mobility, consumer, storage, enterprise networking and Wi-Fi products completes the circuit, delivering a powerful end-to-end total solution to anyone connected to the new global mesh, from consumers to small business and the enterprise.”
The ARMADA XP supplements the Marvell Plug Computer initiative by enabling a new class of mobile servers to serve the growing performance demands of connected consumer devices like smartphones and tablets. The new quad-core further builds on the success of the Marvell® Discovery™ Innovation and ARMADA 300 series by maintaining software compatibility to offer existing Marvell customers significant advantage in terms of reduced development cost and faster time to market.
About ARMADA XP series
The ARMADA XP is based on Marvell-designed ARM v7 MP compatible CPU offering 1.6GHz processing per core performance, delivering 16,600 DMIPS to make high performance computing affordable for mainstream applications. It integrates 2 MB of L2 cache and supports 64-bit DDR3 memory interface with ECC at 800MHz clock rate to enable a high throughput memory sub-system design. The ARMADA XP is a highly integrated System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that combines quad x4 PCI-express (PCI-e) interfaces, multiple USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet ports, SATA ports, security engine and other I/O peripherals to make system designs simple and economical. With ARMADA XP’s advanced power management architecture, it offers the industry’s best performance per watt to alleviate the challenges of energy and cooling costs faced by enterprise and server class systems.
Key Features
- Industry’s first quad-core ARM processor for enterprise applications
- Up to 1.6GHz processing performance for each ARM v7 compliant core
- 16,600 DMIPS performance at less than 10 watts
- “Heterogeneous multiprocessing” (SMP/AMP/Mixed) with “hardware-based Cache Coherence”
- Up to 2MB system level two cache
- Supplements the ARMADA family of single, dual-core and tri-core processors for easy software porting
- 64-bit DDR2/DDR3/DDR3L memory interface with ECC support at up to 800MHz clock rates
- 4 PCI-e Gen 2.0 units
- 4 enterprise class Gigabit networking ports
- Up to 16 high speed Marvell SERDES lanes with multi functionality (PCI-e, SATA, SGMII, QSGMII)
- Multiple USB ports
- Ultra low power consumption with advanced power management capabilities
Comprehensive Development Tools Marvell offers complete development platforms for the ARMADA XP enabling customers to start system development without waiting for hardware. Development platforms are available including software drivers and board support package.
Availability
Marvell’s ARMADA XP will be on display at the ARM Technology Conference on November 9-11, 2010 at booth #200. The ARMADA XP is currently sampling to customers.
Official Marvell product catalogues
- ARMADA 100 the current Sheeva PJ1*-based, “cost sensitive” application processor products (showed along with the preceding PXA3xx – Monahans which came with Intel’s XSCale aquisition). Frequency: 0.4 – 1.2 GHz (the upper limit is missing on the ARMADA* overview page). Instruction Set Architecture (ISA): ARMv5 / XScale.
- ARMADA 300 the Sheeva PJ1*-based embedded processors, currently the ARMADA 300/310SoCs (high-performance ARMADA 300 with frequency of 1.6 – 2.0 GHz, low power ARMADA 310 with frequency of 0.8 GHz and 1.0 GHz), which came in addition to the “pre-ARMADA” Discovery (single core with frequency of 0.6 – 1.2 GHz and dual core with frequency of 0.8 – 1.0 GHz) and Kirkwood (single core with frequency of 0.6 – 2.0 GHz and dual core with frequency of 0.8 – 1.0 GHz) series of PJ1* based products. Instruction Set Architecture (ISA): ARMv5.
- ARMADA 500: the high-end Sheeva PJ4*-based application processors for high performance consumer devices such as netbooks and smartbooks (now would rather be called slates, tables etc.). Currently the ARMADA 510 SoC with frequency of 1.2 GHz. Instruction Set Architecture (ISA): ARM v6 / ARM v7. One of the industry’s first running ARM v7 instruction set.
- ARMADA 600: the high-end Sheeva PJ4*-based application processors bringing high performance to the most compact form factors, such as smartphones and embedded mobile devices. Currently the ARMADA 610 and ARMADA 618 of 1.0 GHz SoCs (check for documentation on ARMADA 628). Instruction Set Architecture (ISA): ARM v6 / ARM v7. One of the industry’s first running ARM v7 instruction set.
- ARMADA 1000: for digital entertainment application processors, i.e. “the next generation of connected full-HD consumer devices, delivering immersive viewing experiences and offering a variety of networked applications at mainstream price points”. Currently the Sheeva PJ1*-based two-core ARMADA 1000/88DE3010 High-Definition Media Processor with frequency of upto 1.2 GHz. Instruction Set Architecture (ISA): ARMv5 / XScale. TDP: 5W (see: Nixeus Fusion XS Brings Marvell into the DMA Market [March 11, 2011]
- ARMADA XP: for enterprise-class cloud computing applications, i.e. “empower emerging cloud computing applications ranging from high performance networking and web servers to high volume home server products like Network Attached Storage (NAS) and media servers”. Quite probably based on Sheeva PJ4* cores, with one, two and four core versions, and a corresponding variety of I/O peripherals on the same chip.
- In the ARMADA XP Product Brief (quite worth to look at) you can find a broader target market defined as: “With its broad offering of 5 pin compatible chips, the ARMADA XP is ideally suited for applications ranging from high-performance networking, wireless infrastructure and web servers to high volume products like NAS, home servers, laser printers and other embedded applications.” This is also showing that the ARMADA XP series SoC is a companion to Marvell’s embedded products as well (shown under embedded for this reason as well), i.e. the Sheeva PJ1* based Discovery, Kirkwood and ARMADA 300 series. The ARMADA XP series of Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is ARM v7 (ARM v6 is not mentioned why it could — quite probably — have an enhanced Sheeva PJ4* core).
SoC advances for client, server and mobile basestation level
Hot Chips 22 (for now, later at Archives) has shown for the first time that System-on-Chip (SoC) technologies are moving beyond their usual realm of relatively small performance and/or dedicated applications, right into the leading edge mainstream.
Update #2:
– Acer adopts AMD CPU for tablet PCs [Nov 25]
Among Acer’s announced initial batch of tablet PCs, a 10.1-inch Windows 7-based model is believed to use AMD’s Ontario APU codenamed C-50, according to sources from notebook players.
… The dual-core C-50 APU, which consumes only 9W of power, is currently priced at about US$55-60 and includes an integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics chip [and also UVD dedicated hardware acceleration for HD video including 1080p resolutions, see later].
– Live and interact in total mobility — Tablets according to Acer [Nov 23]:
… support of its goal to simplify content consumption – a strategy which began with the development of Acer’s multimedia sharing system, Clear.fi. Acer’s strategy is based on the concept of sharing multimedia content and enjoying it across any device, and Tablets are ideal devices for this purpose.
A 10.1” Android tablet for a superb mobile and home entertainment experience … Designed for HD entertainment, this tablet comes with a high resolution, high color contrast display, allowing you to play or share HD video with your friends wherever you are. … Available April 2011
7” Android Tablet: the epitome of mobility … On the 7” (1280×800) 16:10 aspect ratio full touch screen, you can enjoy games, photos, videos while keeping up with your emails or your favourite social networks. Video chat or record a video with the front-facing HD camera. With HDMI support, hooking it up for a big screen video experience is easyier than ever! … Available April 2011
10.1” Windows Tablet: Versatility in a tablet form factor … an extremely innovative solution that combines touch screen user-friendliness with the comfortable experience of a physical keyboard. In fact, the tablet comes with a docking device that includes a full-size keyboard and more connectivity options to enhance the user experience. … Thin and light (only 15 mm and less than 1kg), and with a 10.1”, high resolution display, it’s easy to carry around and really unobtrusive. This tablet ensures outstanding entertainment and a superior touch experience. … Available February 2011
– Acer debuts 10.1-inch Windows 7 tablet: AMD-powered, inbuilt 3G, coming February 2011 [Nov 23]
Update #1: AMD’s upcoming SoCs first described on Hot Chips 22 are hybrid CPUs/GPUs called by AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs)
– AMD Benchmarks Zacate APU [Sept 13]:
… the parts that will begin shipping in Q4 2010: Zacate for mainstream notebooks (18W TDP) and Ontario for netbooks (9W TDP).
Both APUs will have a pair of low-power Bobcat cores and an AMD DX11 GPU. AMD isn’t publicly confirming how many cores the GPU side will have but both will share the same die manufactured on TSMC’s 40nm process.
AMD’s 9W Ontario part clearly goes after Atom in the netbook space (and Bobcat’s out-of-order architecture should ensure performance success), Zacate is going to go after the ~$500 mainstream notebook market. To prove its point AMD setup a Core i5 notebook and a Zacate test platform running City of Heroes at the same settings …
– AMD’s Zacate APU Performance Update [Sept 15]:
… AMD gave us full access to the Zacate platform to do whatever we wanted. AMD wanted us to be completely comfortable with the Zacate comparison. We downloaded the Batman Arkham Asylum demo off of Steam and loaded it on both the Zacate and Core i5 systems.
… The actual gameplay was noticeably quicker on Zacate and the numbers show a 45% performance advantage. This is huge. To sanity check that data we fired up City of Heroes on both machines and played around with them. … On average we saw a 55% improvement over the Core i5 system. … AMD wanted to highlight the DirectCompute performance of Zacate and let us publish the first results from the platform running the N-Body Simulation benchmark: 23 GFLOPS on Zacate and 8.8 GFLOPS on Intel Core i5-520M.
… At the end of the day my take on Zacate (and Ontario) hasn’t changed: these two APUs have the potential to make the low end netbook/notebook market interesting again.
The most glaring examples of the learnings on the Hot Chips 22 were:
Lifting the veil on the hybrid processor-graphics chip in the new Xbox 360 [Aug 23]. This SoC technology has enabled the new Xbox 360 S device’s power consumption and noise significantly reduced, not to speak of the price, which is now $200 for a 4GB version. Because of this Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 S [is a] smash hit, although some are questioning the durability of this trend, attributing it rather to previous Xbox replacements and expecting the bigger trend of the video game industry being down to come into play later. See: Xbox 360 Sales Surge, but Is It an Anomaly? [Aug 16].
AMD Discloses Bobcat & Bulldozer Architectures at Hot Chips 2010 [Aug 24]. These are brand new architecture cores which soon will be integrated into different SoCs, with sub 1 W Bobcat coming into the Ontario SoC (with a yet undisclosed GPU core) aimed at netbooks, ultra-low voltage tablet (slate etc.) and notebook devices the earliest. This might happen by the end of the year, or in Q1 2011.
More information:
– AMD update from IFA 2010 [Sept 6]:
AMD plans to ramp production here in 2010, with systems available in early 2011. So here at IFA 2010, we’re both demonstrating the capabilities of low-power AMD Fusion APUs, and providing a little more information on the individual products. “Brazos” is the codename for the notebook, netbook and desktop platforms that will be built from the APU. But the APU itself comes in two flavors based on performance and (low) power draw:
- An 18-watt TDP APU codenamed “Zacate” for ultrathin, mainstream, and value notebooks as well as desktops and all-in-ones.
- And a 9-watt APU codenamed “Ontario” for netbooks and small form factor desktops and devices.
Both low-power APU versions feature two “Bobcat” x86 cores and fully support DirectX11, DirectCompute (Microsoft programming interface for GPU computing) and OpenCL (cross-platform programming interface standard for multi-core x86 and accelerated GPU computing). Both also include UVD dedicated hardware acceleration for HD video including 1080p resolutions.
– AMD’s Bobcat mobile architecture will play it straight [Aug 27]: “Bobcat will smoke Atom clock-for-clock in raw performance, but the performance per watt picture is a bit less clear. This is because it is quite apparent that AMD will have a harder time keeping its power consumption down than Intel does with Atom. … Bobcat is more of a threat to Atom in the netbook and laptop segments than it is in the kinds of appliance-type niches that Intel is now aiming its Atom-based SoCs at. And nobody is going to try to squeeze Bobcat into a smartphone form factor anytime soon”.
– AMD Bobcat & Bulldozer Hot Chips Presentations Online [Aug 25],
– AMD Sets New Mark in x86 Innovation with First Detailed Disclosures of Two New Core Designs [AMD press release, Aug 24],
– AMD Bulldozer and Bobcat Hot Chips Press Kit [Aug 24]
– ”Bulldozer” 20 Questions, Round One [AMD, Aug 23]
– Keeping AMD’s 2011 Code-Names Straight [Aug 24]
– AMD’s Bulldozer Architecture Preview: New from the Ground Up [Aug 24]
– AMD Heats VISION – Hot Chips 22 [Aug 24]
Mindspeed to Present Next Generation of 4G Base Station Technology at HOT CHIPS 22 Conference [Mindspeed press release, Aug 23]. Here the essence is:
“3G and 4G network operators are looking to migrate to a more flexible cellular landscape, which can accommodate compact base stations, such as microcells, picocells and metro femtocells. Mindspeed has designed the Transcede family of baseband processors to enable tomorrow’s network architects to deploy powerful 4G macrocells and ‘small cells,’ which are built on a common framework.”
Launched earlier this year at the 2010 Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain, the Transcede family of SoCs integrates an unprecedented 26 programmable processors into a single device, including two ARM(R) Cortex A9(R) multi-core symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors, ten CEVA(R) digital signal processors (DSPs) and ten DSP accelerators that support the complete wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA), LTE or WiMAX (Layers 1, 2 and above) processing needs of single- and multi-sector base stations.
More information:
– Transcede 4000 Series Product Brief [Jan 24]
– Documentation
3.9G TD-LTE rollout in 2012 with integrated 2G, 3G and 4G?
See also: Mobile Internet (Aug’11) which is a total update on Aug 26, 2011 with a lot of additions to the original July 19, 2010 content on the following subjects:
– LTE and LTE Advanced — HSPA Evolved (parallel to LTE and LTE Advanced) — Heterogeneous networks or HetNets — Femtocells and Picocells — Qualcomm innovations in all that — Ericsson’s LTE Advanced demo — Current roadmaps on evolutions of current 3G+ broadband mobile networks
A small news item on DigiTimes last week has gone around the technical web quite fast: China Mobile to expand 4G network trial operations [16 July]
China Mobile Communications will expand the trial operation of its 4G networks in the fourth quarter of 2010 and a successful run of the trials may push China Mobile to start rolling out its 4G infrastructure in 2012, 2-3 years ahead of its original schedule, according to industry sources.
- Latest update: China-version iPhones to adopt China Mobile TD-LTE technology, says paper [May 23, 2011] (emphasis is mine)
China Mobile Communications has reached a consensus with Apple under which the next-generation of iPhones to be sold in China will adopt TD-LTE technology developed by China Mobile, the Chinese-language Commercial Times quoted the China-based carrier’s chairman Wang Jianzhou as saying.
China Mobile has begun voice testing on its TD-LTE experimental networks in Shanghai and commercial operations of the 4G networks in China are expected to begin in 2012, the paper said.
By 2012, China Mobile also plans to set up over 40 experimental networks, 10 commercial networks and 20,000 base stations globally to promote the adoption of the TD-LTE technology, the paper added.
- Update: the rollout could begin even earlier
– China Mobile considering launch of TD-LTE services ahead of schedule [Dec 14]
– China market: China Mobile to set up TD-LTE trial networks in six cities, says media [Nov 2] comes with the information that “China Mobile will invest 1.5 billion yuan (US$225 million) to establish trial networks of its self-developed version of LTE, TD-LTE (time division-Long Term Evolution), covering a total of 3,060 base stations in six large cities in China, according to China-based media CCTTR World Communications. The six large cities are Beijing in the northern region, Shanghai and Nanjing in the eastern region, Xiamen in the southeastern region, Guangzhou and Shenzhen in the southern region, the source indicated.”
– China Mobile: 4G network coming soon [Sept 15] is stating that “4G data card is close to debut and the carrier and partners are working on the research of 4G handset chip … China Mobile is expected to launch 4G mobile communication services as early as 2011 to boost its high-margin data services, according to the GSM Association.”
– China Mobile to set up device sourcing company [Sept 17] is telling that “The planned device-sourcing company will begin to purchase TD-SCDMA-enabled feature phones with prices below 1,000 yuan (US$148) at the end of the year and then shift to smartphones priced below 2,000 yuan [with the above mentioned 4G handset chip I would assume] in the first half of 2011“. - For background information on these technologies see: Mobile Internet
- For background information why such an extraordinary acceleration effort is needed see: Could China close the gap in mobile Internet? It should! [July 19]
- For background information regarding Huawei’s contribution to the Shanghai World Expo’s TD-LTE Demo Network see: Winners–TD-LTE connecting World Expo (PDF) and Winners–The brilliant debut: TD-LTE elevates experience at World Expo (PDF), both are from Huawei’s WinWin E-Zine Issue 6 [Aug 10, 2010 — text only HTML versions: the first and the second].
More information has become available from TMC, last week as well: China Mobile, Huawei roll out China’s first 3G/4G-integrated trial network [July 16]
China Mobile (CHL.NYSE; 00941.HK) and Chinese mobile equipment and network solutions provider Huawei Technologies have finished the first TD-SCDMA/TD-LTE outfield test and completed a series of tests and verifications in Wuxi, Jiangsu province.
The tests show that the 3G/4G-integrated network and smooth evolution are completely feasible.
… the technology will be tested in three Chinese mainland cities in the final quarter of the year, with 100 base stations constructed and 5,000 people invited to use the service.
At the beginning of the trial operation, China Mobile will offer data cards to the users and provide them with smartphones.
Results drew from such tests may facilitate China Mobile to offer 4G services in 2012, earlier than previously expected 2014 to 2015.
An insider at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology revealed that China Mobile will select three coastal cities to pilot the TD-LTE networks, and Qingdao, Xiamen, Zhuhai, and Wuxi are all candidates.
The insider believes that 2G, 3G and 4G services will all be available to Chinese telecom service subscribers at the same time in future [emphasis mine], rather than high-grade technology substituting the lower-grade options.
A UK report from a day earlier has indicated foreign operator and supplier interest as well: TD-LTE 4G Sweeping the Wireless Broadband Markets in China [July 15]
… a variety of wireless operator companies have actually started shifting to TD-LTE, inside and outside China. Two of the main users recorded are Qualcomm and Yota. … This new technology is expected to hit the markets within two years, after a series of field tests.
Ulf Ewaldsson, Ericsson VP, said, “The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and China Mobile will start large-scale field tests in the fourth quarter of this year. Ericsson will also take part”.
Ericsson’s strong commitment and technical readiness has already been demonstrated a week ago indeed: First complete TD-LTE solution showcased [July 12]
At a China Mobile event in Shanghai, China today, Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) showcased its complete end-to-end TD-LTE solution for the first time. Together with ST-Ericsson devices, the system successfully showcased super-fast mobile broadband applications such as video on demand (VOD) and video streaming using a live camera.
… ST-Ericsson, a leader in wireless platforms and semiconductors, was the first in the world to demonstrate a handheld LTE device and to achieve LTE and HSPA mobility with a multimode device [emphasis mine]. Available next year, ST-Ericsson’s next generation modem will support both versions of LTE, in addition to TD-SCDMA and HSPA+/EDGE [emphasis mine]. With ST-Ericsson’s products, Ericsson is now the only player with complete end-to-end TD-LTE capabilities in the industry.
- Important addition: TDD-LTE equipments by Q1 2011: Ericsson [July 24]
NEW DELHI, INDIA: Ericsson in its claim has shortened the time period for availability of TDD (time division duplex)-LTE equipment from 2013 end to first quarter of 2011.
Per Thorzell, head, radio Access Network, Ericsson India added that Ericsson also did a TDD-LTE trial run in India using 20 Mhz spectrum and achieved a download speed of 71 mbps per second. … “There are approximately 95 per cent functional similarity between TDD and FDD-LTE. Therefore chipsets that support FDD-LTE will also support TDD-LTE,” … to support TDD-LTE, Ericsson feels there will be dongles as access devices in the first half of 2011 and later handheld devices.
Of the two companies mentioned in the above UK article Yota is a Russia-based mobile operator expanding to other countries worldwide, while Qualcomm is the most influential wireless telecommunications research and development company, as well as the largest fabless chip supplier in the world.
Qualcomm has a unique role in the possible 2-3 years acceleration of the TD-LTE technology. The Casino Royale: The story of Qualcomm [July 12] article from July 16 issue of Forbes India, republished on-line by moneycontrol.com, “India’s No. 1 financial portal” has been summarized on the cover as:
Qualcomm is one of the great technology companies of our times. Its products drive large parts of telecom networks everywhere. Everywhere, except India. Now after almost a decade of trying to open up the Indian market, Qualcomm’s time might finally be here. And it will all because of what Qualcomm learnt in China.
Going into the article one can see what made Rohin Dharmakumar, the author of the article to arrive to such a conclusion. Some excerpts from the point of view of our subject:
They [Qualcomm] had invented a proprietary technology that became the seed for the wireless standard CDMA … CDMA began to be adopted by the world’s mobile operators from the mid-90s after years of relentless hard-selling … , backed up by equally relentless patenting by … engineers in the R&D department. … Today, the company … sits on a pile of over USD 18 billion in cash while generating another USD 2-3 billion in free cash flows every year!
Qualcomm’s model as it exists is simple. Be inventive, file as many patents as possible in wireless communication, and then build products around those or wait for people to queue up to use those patents and pay a nice royalty to the company.
… Qualcomm’s patents are critical to almost all major wireless standards on the GSM, CDMA and even LTE (Long Term Evolution) sides, helping it squeeze a royalty out of quite literally anyone and everyone. An army of its lawyers and patent experts go after any company that dares touch its wireless IP without paying for it.
… The first star that heralded its new fortune was the successful completion of India’s 3G auctions. Because Qualcomm’s IP is embedded in all 3G technologies, it will make a 4-5% cut off every 3G phone that will now be sold in India.
… The second omen was on March 11, at a press conference in New Delhi’s Oberoi hotel, when Kanwalinder Singh, its India head said, “Today I’m very proud to announce that Qualcomm has invested one billion US dollars into India.”
Singh did not spend that money in building offices, hiring thousands of new employees or buying local businesses. He spent it to buy 20 megahertz (MHz) of spectrum in the cities of Mumbai and New Delhi and the states of Haryana and Kerala. Qualcomm was one of the six companies that won precious spectrum to offer high speed “4G” wireless broadband to Indians. The $1 billion spent in India was its single largest bet anywhere around the world.
The funny thing though is that Qualcomm is betting on deploying a technology that it didn’t think much of to begin with, a commercially unproven technology called TD-LTE originally developed by the Chinese.
Learning from the Chinese
The Chinese government, in the mid-90s, decided to develop a technology to avoid paying royalties to Western companies like Qualcomm. They created TD-SCDMA, a 3G wireless standard. But it never really took off*. The Chinese, in order to avoid paying royalties, had to reinvent the wheel. This made their technology cumbersome and inefficient.
* Personal note: TD-SCDMA in fact took off in 2009, and that was just too late only for international acceptance (being a 3G technology). See the 3G China customer base chart in my earlier OPhone OS (OMS) 2.0 based on Android 2.1 [July 5] article.
The Chinese pumped more resources into it and refined it into TD-LTE. They also roped in two large Western partners, Verizon and Vodafone, to conduct joint trials of LTE combing the Western (FD) flavour with its own (TD) one. Julian Grivolas, an analyst with Ovum in Paris who tracks the LTE space closely, says China’s goal was to make sure that this joint LTE becomes the next equivalent of the mobile world’s ubiquitous GSM standard.
But the company that took advantage of this trend the fastest was the one which was the last to join the LTE party — Qualcomm. For that it had to swallow its pride and abandon Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB), a 4G technology it had been developing for many years. In late 2008, it abandoned UMB to focus exclusively on LTE when it saw big operators tilting towards it. A few years earlier it had already spent over USD 800 million to acquire Flarion, a company with a significant amount of patents in areas related to LTE.
Qualcomm smartly co-opted its erstwhile foe China into becoming an ally by announcing plans to build new “multi-mode” mobile chipset** that would combine the version of LTE that Qualcomm and a galaxy of mobile companies like Ericsson and Nokia had developed along with what the Chinese had developed [emphasis mine].
** Personal note: see Qualcomm Introduces World’s First Complete Multi-mode 3G/LTE Integrated Solution for Smartphones [Feb 16, 2009], Qualcomm Now Sampling Industry’s First Dual-carrier HSPA+ and Multi-Mode 3G/LTE Chipsets for Global Markets [Nov 12, 2009] and Qualcomm to launch TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE next year [Nov 19, 2009]. Update: Qualcomm Now Demonstrating Products Based on LTE TDD Technology — Company on Track with Commercialization of Products Based on LTE TDD Technology with First Devices Expected in Mid-2011 [Sept 8, 2010]. At the same time we had news that Qualcomm now has 4G licensing deals with the big three [Nov 16, 2009]: Qualcomm told its investor meeting that LG has joined Samsung and Nokia in agreeing to pay to use its technology in future 4G products. “This means they have 65% of the handset market signed up to long term royalty agreements [emphasis mine],” JP Morgan analyst Steven O’Brien told Reuters. “We have more certainty in the royalty streams and cashflow streams from the major handset vendors.”
Given that a significant chunk of TD-LTE patents rest with Chinese companies like China Mobile, Huawei and ZTE, the only way Qualcomm would have integrated them into its own offerings would be by cross-licensing*** — basically sharing patents with them. The Chinese are returning the love because a global acceptance of TD-LTE will mean cheaper equipment prices for its mobile operators and larger markets for its equipment vendors.
*** Personal note: There is no information regarding these cross licensing agreements, although they definitely exist. We only know that the Chinese were quite successful in licensing negotiations even before. See CDMA success brings Chinese royalty gripes [Feb 12, 2009]: “… in 2000 Irwin Jacobs [the father of current CEO] negotiated government permission for CDMA to be used in China, Qualcomm granted Chinese manufacturers the best rates in the world — around 2.65% as opposed to 5% for other makers. (Qualcomm neither discloses nor confirms its royalty rates).”
Such an advantage even prompted the following: “In fact, outside of China, TD-SCDMA is generally dismissed as a negotiating ploy by China to obtain acceptable patent cross licensing agreements with Qualcomm, Ericsson and the like.” – see An update on TD-SCDMA, China’s 3G technology [Oct 18, 2007]
With TD-LTE under his belt, [Paul] Jacobs [their CEO] knew he had WiMAX cornered.
What happened to WiMAX in the last month I’ve already described in:
• WiMAX/WiBro <=> TD-LTE and LTE in general [June 28]
• Intel dismisses WiMAX Program Office [July 1]
In addition to that it is also worth to note that LTE is Changing the Landscape of IPR Wealth [May 18, 2010]:
… the 2G, 3G, and 3.5G IPR [Intellectual Property Rights] landscape was dominated by Qualcomm, Nokia, and Ericsson … “While Interdigital and Qualcomm are clear leaders in the global LTE patents portfolio with 21% and 19% market shares respectively of the total number of patents, Huawei comes in third position with 9%, Samsung in fourth with 8%, and Nokia, LG, and Ericsson in joint fifth place, each with 7% market share,” [said Malik] Kamal Saadi [, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media].
… Until now only a third of current global LTE patents could be described as essential but about 60% of them are recognised as having the potential to become essential in the future. Whether or not a patent is viewed as being essential could also vary from one market to another. For example, from the 182 LTE patents contributed by Huawei, 178 are registered in China and only a handful of these could currently be described as essential. …
… Informa Telecoms and Media believes that more than 60% of LTE patents from likes of Qualcomm and Nokia, 50% of LG’s portfolio, 40% of Samsung’s patents, and less than 33% of Ericsson’s portfolio could be described as essential LTE patents so far.
The second omen was on March 11, at a press conference in New Delhi’s Oberoi hotel, when Kanwalinder Singh, its India head said, “Today I’m very proud to announce that Qualcomm has invested one billion US dollars into India.”
Singh did not spend that money in building offices, hiring thousands of new employees or buying local businesses. He spent it to buy 20 megahertz (MHz) of spectrum in the cities of Mumbai and New Delhi and the states of Haryana and Kerala. Qualcomm was one of the six companies that won precious spectrum to offer high speed “4G” wireless broadband to Indians. The $1 billion spent in India was its single largest bet anywhere around the world.
The funny thing though is that Qualcomm is betting on deploying a technology that it didn’t think much of to begin with, a commercially unproven technology called TD-LTE originally developed by the Chinese.
Intel SoC for Cloud Clients
While ARM system-on-a-chips (SoCs) are dominating the fast growing cloud client segment (smart phones, tablets, e-readers etc.) Intel has finally begun marketing his 1st generation Moorestown to generate design wins needed for next year’s Medfield 2nd generation SoC “product delivery en-mass” successes. Marketing in a true, positive sense by giving professional quality SoC information.
- Update: Finally the information detailed below is surfacing even from the most Windows slate concious manufacturers. See: MSI waiting on Intel Oak Trail for Win 7 tablet, Android version will hit before end of the year [Aug 23].
This week the CTO and Research Chief, Justin Rattner first time has given a “behind the scenes” look into their effort. See Gizmodo’s: Intel’s Chief Wizard Conjures the Cloud, Apple and a Phone That Keep Secrets. His answer to the question “Why is Intel not really in mobile phones yet?” is worth to be quoted here:
There was a lot of concern that what became Atom would cannibalize the laptop business, which didn’t materialize. Instead we created a whole new category around netbooks! But that was the big fear, and that cost us probably a good two, maybe even three years, before everybody was convinced we could introduce a cheaper, slower, more energy efficient product and not damage the main revenue.
Not by coincidence we have had this week another “behind the scenes” look given by Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar, “father of Centrino” and lately (for years) the leading authority on Moorestown. See the interview with him in tom’s hardware: Tom’s Talks Moorestown With The Father Of Centrino. Here we have another quote worth to be included here:
[Re: Why did it take Intel until now to come out with its own SoC?]
That’s kind of a complex question. Let’s talk about the notebook, which was my last platform before I worked on this one. The notebook platform has very little motivation to shrink in size, especially in desktop replacements. Several years ago, we were trying to get the desktop side to adopt a lot of the notebook’s capabilities. [Ed.: Presumably, this refers to the mobile-on-desktop effort back from the Core Duo days.]
But the desktop industry and users had very little motivation because of the developed component ecosystem for power delivery, heatsinks—the whole nine yards needed to build a desktop. And a similar thing has evolved around the notebook. The need for space and capabilities are very different between these platforms. When not driven by the constraints of size and capability, these platforms can use existing components and programable logic to do, for example, video decode and encode. There’s little motivation for them to move to an SoC-like environment.
But when you come to such things as handheld devices, set-top boxes, and embedded systems, all of these have size and power constraints. Constraint is the mother of necessity that drove us to designing SoCs. We needed a such-and-such size chip with certain capabilities and power—high performance CPU, memory controller, graphics controller, video controller, decoder/encoder. You have to wire all of those things up into that limited real estate. That’s what drove us into building an SoC for this class of devices—need more than anything else.
When reading those articles I’m suggesting to go through the comments as well. They will give you an idea of typical external reactions to the views of these most competent Intel insiders.
And a final remark. This is first time Intel clearly communicates why Microsoft Windows (as we know it today) is not running on these x86 processors:
Ticky Thakkar: We had a great, ultramobile, PC-class device platform before. It was low power…but not low enough. So the big challenge for us was to figure out how to deliver low idle power in this kind of form factor. We have work going on in our labs with OSPM—OS Power Management. We want to use Intel’s process strength to get as much out of the process as possible in terms of performance integration and the low active power you can get from the smaller transistors. We introduced the notion of power gating at the island level. We want to use only the power needed to do the activity that you’re doing, not switch on anything else. Today, most operating systems, such as the larger Windows-style OS, do quite the opposite. It’s like opening your front door and the whole house lights up. That’s not what we wanted to do here.
Tom’s hardware: Which explains probably part of why Moorestown for phones doesn’t support PCI and thus Windows, but larger form factor Atom platform versions, including the forthcoming Oaktrail platform, do.
Ticky Thakkar: There are many factors at work here. … In transitioning from a PC to a handheld device, we don’t need to use some of the PC I/Os. We kind of got rid of PCI Express and put in handheld I/Os that are more pertinent to what we need. Things such as MIPI I/Os. MIPI is the handheld I/O organization. To give you an idea, the difference between LVDS and the MIPI interface, just the interface link power is about a 125 mW difference. All these kinds of things allowed us to get to lower power.
To understand the essence of Windows capable “Oak Trail” SoC derived from Moorestown and to be made available in “early 2011” read this Gizmodo news nugget:
Intel “Oak Trail” Is Official: Tablet Processors With Windows, Android, and MeeGo Support.
