Qualcomm was an odd duck way back when all this phone stuff kicked off.  They didn't go heavily into A8, but jumped into A9 with their own design called Krait -- and they stayed there making improvements along the way.

Now, the Qualcomm fully intergrated everything on the chip including 4 A9 Krait cores is the ARM chipset to beat -- and ARM did NOT design it at all.   Qualcomm is demanding Microsoft pricing (less a tad) and is getting it because they ARE the very best in the world right now, bar none.

Samsung paid attention to this and is currently dissatisfied with plain jane Android as an OS and is now signaling that they are dissatisfied with the plain Jane ARM chipset designs as a design source.  

Samsung now buys all their simple plain Jane ARM chipsets from Mediatek as Mediatek does them well and at a HUGE volume/cost ratio that is better than Samsung can do in house.

DISSATISFACTION with ARM designs ....  of all the current makers, Samsung is best qualified to have this dissatisfaction feeling as they are the ones who got stung badly with the nasty ARM bobble over the poor multicore scheduling that was put out with the first version of big/LITTLE octa core chipsets.    Samsung lost some face and lots of money off that little ARM 5410 design bugger-up.

Samsung has just indicated that they will go into full design mode on their own SOCs starting with the first generation of 64 bit ARM designs as their jump off point (in 2014).   Samsung is going to follow Qualcomm off into a fully integrated "all in one" SOC that is totally aimed at particular products and a particular mobile OS.  

Since Samsung will make the product itself, the OS and the chipset all together, they can become an Apple type model as far as getting their stuff to work together well, offering superior features and performance on the top end of things.

This will put them a leg up on Qualcomm who just builds chipsets.

Look to see Samsung to continue to put out standard plain Jane Android stuff like they do now, except based on low cost Mediatek chipsets.   Also look for Samsung to put out high end products on tweeked cores running a tweeked OS on a custom built product (a la Apple).

Look for all of the first line producers to offer a convergent product soon, especially since Microsoft has announced they have it (although they really don't have it yet).

Convergence is now a selling point, a big one.   People WANT the same look and feel and softwares on all of their various stuff -- screw having different OS's on each different thing.   Who is willing to keep track of all the stuff you have to remember about each OS to use them all effectively ???  

Not me ....



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Looking back at ARM over the last 5 years, I used to count the days until I could go "double up" on my old white box PC.   That came and went a while ago and I actually did buy an RK3166 dual core stick that had 2 gigs of memory and two 1.6 ghz cores which showed that it really could do anything my old PC could do, faster and better.  

It was hooked up to my main TV where it stayed until CBS made it clear that they were never going to support anything but plain Jane Microsoft with their NCIS streaming, which is what drove me to hook an old outdated laptop up to the TV instead.

Convergence, not hardware will drive your next choice in stuff.
In America, MS still has a shot at being the dominant convergence supplier, but they aren't going to do it if they keep on ignoring ARM hardware as a primary full OS platform.  

All they are doing right now is giving the Android world time to morph into a full business satisfying convergence of their own.

MS needs to co-opt the cheap ARM hardware into their main OS model ASAP, and do it very very quickly as within a year somebody in the open source world will mod Android (or Tisen, or Sailfish, or Firefox) into a full convergence model at a much much lower price point.

After all, Samsung is moving towards convergence on their own now, holding OS and chipset design & mgf and the device/hardware all inside their own control.   Full Apple style control that is better than what MS can swing now even with Nokia in house.

Apple, look out ....  you cannot afford to be lazy now but must integrate all your OS products at once as well.   You can't take 2-3 years to do it either.

Convergence sells.

It isn't a simple processor power race any more, it is a coherent platform across all devices race that will motivate your next set of purchases.  

Apple has shown us that a dual core 64 bit ARM chipset sharing processing tasks with the GPU cores is PLENTY powerful enough to do the job on the hand held and laptop platforms.  

So the upcoming quad to octa core 64 bit ARM SOCs containing 6 to 16 Mali graphics cores all sharing the computing tasks "in full hardware integration"  will be able to outdo the current dual core Apple set ups by a goodly margin.


Assuming ARM doesn't frick it up again in the fine details come introduction time, of course ....


      Keep watching ol' Samsung for what they do -- they are currently the world's largest supplier of cell phones, TVs, and "smart" electronics of all sorts and types.  

They are vying to become the 800 pound Gorilla worldwide to replace Apple in the same way Apple replaced Microsoft in the USA ....