Hardware, Mobile Computing, Opinion, VR World

Is Qualcomm Behind the Lack of High-End LTE-enabled PC Gadgetry?

Held in the New York City-sized, yet younger than many of us, Shenzhen metropolis, the last weeks’ IDF provided quite a number of announcements which you can anyway read on the usual press release reprinting web sites. Here’s something that you might not find that easily, though… During my walkabout IDF Shenzhen tours, I had a chat with one high end OEM who was twice evaluating a 2-in-1 very high end LTE enabled Haswell ultrabook & tablet combo device with a built-in full LTE capability and the integrated pop-up SIM card slot. After all, if having a local LTE SIM card, you are far more

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Hardware, Mobile Computing, VR World

Qualcomm Announces 20nm Snapdragon 808 and Snapdragon 810 64-Bit Chips

Cat9 LTE Qualcomm

Qualcomm has been fairly quiet about their high-end ambitions after what is expected to follow the soon-to-launch Snapdragon 805 chipset. The Snapdragon 805 is Qualcomm’s chip that will likely ship in devices next quarter and is marketed by Qualcomm as their 4K chip with the Adreno 420 GPU. Now, even though the Snapdragon 805 (APQ8084) is a very powerful chip, it lacks 64-bit capability and doesn’t have an integrated modem, requiring a separate modem like Qualcomm’s 20nm MDM9x35 to enable cellular capability. It also sports an improved Krait CPU with a Krait 450 CPU compared to the Snapdragon 801 and 800’s Krait 400. However, it

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AMD, Apple, Business, Companies, Graphics, Intel, Microsoft, VR World

Recession is over? TSMC, UMC, VIS show large growth in orders

When world recession struck last year, contract foundries were hit really hard, with utilization dropping as low as 30%, sending workers home, introducing single-shift days and 4-day weeks. Largest players in the field, Taiwanese TSMC, UMC were forced to live through all of these measures in order to stay in the black. Courtesy of DigiTimes, we learned that both TSMC and UMC are reporting utilization growing back to 50-60%, thanks to a large number of rushed orders by foreign contracting firms. If we look at a chart above, we see that in December ’08, TSMC dipped as low as negative 31.5% compared to October, while

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