OK, who is still vibrant and shaking things up some in Mobile?

Apple really owns it from the top down, and is doing their yearly upgrade to new stuff as we speak.   Samsung is building their chipsets for them, as well as Intel (Intel is doing fewer all the time though).

Qualcomm "thinks they own it" in mobile and still is making aggressive strides to protect their business from the hockey stick guys on the low end and from Samsung/Apple on the top end.   Qualcomm is the highest volume phone chip provider right now, to be sure.

Samsung has gotten somewhat off the cutting edge lately, they have been having to buy some Qualcomm and Mediatek processors to fill in here and there, but this year seem to have the 14nm process and the chipsets to go it alone as a front runner on the high end.  

High cost is killing Samsung as the Mediatek chipsets come washing into the bottom and middle in a huge low cost wave.   Samsung is getting limited to upper end phones by the relentless low to mid-range competition.   This is bad for Samsung as they used to own the middle portion of the market.   Samsung has lost 25% of their old market share to the hockey stick guys and Xiaomi and the other Chinese phone makers.   Samsung's phone profits took a 60% dip last year as the Galaxy S5 didn't do well last year.

Mediatek has announced they are going to be the new Qualcomm and they have a new global LTE chip and baseband setup to allow their MANY MANY MANY versions of phone chips to go into the middle to low upper end market share around the world.   I watch Mediatek for what will be affordable next year as they seem to define what is affordable right now by and large with Qualcomm still controlling the LTE portion of the business.

Mediatek thinks the A57 chipset is simply too hot running and power wasting for the processing yield that it actually offers, so they are going with a pair of A72 on the premium end "bigs" and use four A17 on the broad middle range products.  

They may have spotted a winning mixture of technologies there since they can mix and match big / little pair ups using the A53 chipset (which Mediatek likes a lot) on the small side and either the A72 or the A17 for the big side of the match up.   This mix works with 6 core sets and 8 core sets for bulk market, with only a dual core A72 being required on the upper end due to the monster A72 core size.

When Mediatek and Qualcomm begin to actively compete in a worldwide LTE market each with their own separate "global LTE chipsets" to match up with their own separate ARM processor sets you can expect the price of 4G LTE phones to come down drastically yet again.    

This sort of Mediatek action may squeeze Samsung out of its position as a high cost middle to high end phone supplier.   New Oriental BYOP phone brands will come to America en-masse along with the Mediatek LTE chipset revolution.

I just bought a $127.95 BLU Studio 5.0" HD 4G LTE Qualcomm based phone from Amazon --- the Mediatek phones were cheaper but didn't support T-Mobile highest speeds nearly as well as the Qualcomm chipset did.    This will likely change up with the new Mediatek global LTE which is coming out this summer and which will be common (and low cost) by next summer.

BYOP is getting big with T-Mobile with Amazon selling them in selection sets that are grouped by the Carrier and the specific level of service you plan to buy.

This makes it easier for folks to find the right BYOP phone that works with their carrier and plan.   

People are flat getting tired of paying $650 for a  <$300 phone from the actual carriers any more.   In the orient, Bring Your Own Phone is the only way it gets done any more.

T-Mobile has the fastest (and the cheapest) 4G LTE  three + person family plan in America right now.    They do the best BYOP and DO NOT REQUIRE A 2 YEAR CONTRACT.  Coverage is all major cities and along the interstates right now, but their fall back HSPA+  (fancy 3G) isn't all that bad and it is all over the rest of the country.   Plus T-Mobile is into Wifi phone functions already and T-Mobile is reportedly one of the companies Google is working with on their new wifi phone system.

I bought a phone and chipset that does 4G LTE at 100+mbps at full speed (major cities only) and HSPA+ at current 21mbs out in the countryside (up to 41mbps is possible on newly renovated HSPA+ rural towers).  

And is should mebbe be able to do the Google upcoming wifi tricks as well .....

..... for $127.95 with free 2 day delivery from Amazon.

http://liliputing.com/2015/03/chromebooks-with-nvidia-tegra-x1-chips-on-the-w...

Intel just grunted because somebody just poked them in the nose too.   Twice no less ....



Yup, that is the Nvidia Tegra X1 heavy hitter chipset which has just shown up on two separate Google Chromebook development pages as Smaug and Foster, two separate  different Chromebook motherboards for two different vendors.

Folks are waiting for Intel to release some brown vapor in response, assuming Intel has any bean power left to poot out anything significant since their 14nm stuff is so far behind and is so underperforming at this point in time.

Intel is currently pushing price supported old 22nm Core i3 and Core i5 chipsets out as their current "innovative" Chromebox chipsets, but that move will not play well in Chromebooks as battery life is a prime consideration in a laptop.

Humorous caption, not a quote.

We are .... this .... close to having a idea for a competitive Rockchip/Spreadtrum/Sophia chipset for tentative delivery sometimes in 2016/2017 .....





=================================



and, true to form, two days later Intel squeezes out a little poot of vague future brown nasty vapor .....



"So what can we expect from the first Braswell chips? While we won’t be able to say much about their performance until we have a chance to actually test them, here are some of the specs:

Celeron N3000 – 1.04 GHz dual-core CPU with 1MB L2 cache, 4W TDP, and burst speeds up to 2.08 GHz
Celeron N3050 – 1.6 GHz dual-core CPU with 1MB L2 cache, 6W TDP, and burst speeds up to 2.16 GHz
Celeron N3150 – 1.6 GHz quad-core CPU with 2MB L2 cache, 6W TDP, and burst speeds up to 2.08 GHz
Pentium N3700 – 1.6 GHz quad-core CPU with 2MB L2 cache, 6W TDP, and burst speeds up to 2.4 GHz

All of these processors are 14nm chips with support for DDR3-1600 memory and the dual-core chips feature 320 MHz graphics with GPU burst speeds of 600 MHz. The Celeron N3150 processor has a 640 MHz GPU, while the Pentium N3700 has a 700 MHz GPU."

Prediction time

Intel must break into mobile in 2015 -- they MUST find a way to make a profitable chipset, even if it is somebody else's design.   THEY ABSOLUTELY HAVE to fill up their 14nm lines to 100% capacity and keep them there as they convert over the old 22nm lines to the new process.  

Intel can only operate at 100% utilization and at 100% full speed and be efficient.   If this means learning how to operate at lower margins and laying off deadwood to lower prices, then so be it.   If it means shutting down a third of their capacity until they have the business to cover it, then they have to do that too.

INTEL MUST CRANK UP THE INTEL STEAM ROLLER and roll all over those little guys crunchy little corpses to get their volume share.

Problem for Intel in their normal  "business model"  modus operandi is that they must go do all this slaughtering and steam rollering in CHINA and they are already on provisional status with the Chinese government already for their past misbehaviors.    

One regulatory rifle shot from the Chinese government and Intel goes down with a big 'ol hole in their little 'ol puddin' haid.  

And they don't get back up again.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/31/at-149-google-unveils-its-cheapest-chromebo...



Oh, the impactful news continues --- Amazon has a $149 Chromebook too, the Haier white model.

Oh, and the level of verbal bashing out on the net is getting really intense, all the MS fanboys are tearing up the keyboards wanting to know WHY would anybody buy one of these things.

Google posts a video that gives the purpose of the machines, without saying anything at all.

https://youtu.be/lHjNxscOY_M     it is a one (1) minute movie, jest click on it and watch it

MS fanboys are screaming at this because it disrupts their entire world view about hardware, they worship their super expensive hardware and slave away at taking care of it.   They spend more on a water-cooled heatsink than these entire units cost (and the wake up speed and the browsing speed they see in these unis  REALLY REALLY  pisses them off yet further as their big expensive super-strong rig takes 20 times longer to start up and then load a program and then actually go DO anything)

The thought of hardware that is "just there when you want it" totally confuses them.

And they can't understand how Chrome has taken 25% USA market share away from MS laptop sales .....

...... and successfully bridged the gap space between tablets and laptops ......

...... and how Chromebooks fit neatly into the Android phone ecosystem that so many of us live in every day .....

It angers them to see this Chrome stuff just running away with and destroying what they believe in so devotedly.

        That's OK, them little mammals pissed the dinosaurs off too.   Ate all them big 'ol eggs the dinos left buried in the sand, they did.



================================



Performance and battery life of the RK3288 chipset units are different according to the ghz speed the setup is given during construction.   The Amazon Haier is clocked slower at 1.7 ghz and it gives a 10+ hour battery life while giving performance that is better than the entire set of gen 1 Chromebooks were able to give.  

However, we are at gen 4 now and this Amazon Haier is likely to be considered "underperforming" as originally set up so perhaps the Haier setup ghz parameters might get changed shortly, as well as growing a 4 gig systems memory version for "upscale users".

The Walmart Hisense is clocked faster at 2.0 ghz and it does perform about as well as a Tegra K1 ASUS unit from early this year.   But it offers about the same level (7.5 to 8 hours) of battery life while doing so.   Look for the 4 gig upscale version to come out soon here too.

Mediatek may have all the answers for what comes next, as they have an entire CREW of lithography reduced, tuned, upscale A-17 main processor chipsets now in 4 core, 6 core and 8 core formats with some A53 littles tossed into the mix for vastly improved battery life while doing simple tasks.   And with much better VR graphics processors in them too.

Mediatek is also prepping up a set of Chromebooks with their favorite tablet vendors .....  and these more modern Cortex A-17 units might upset the status quo by being FASTER than current low end Chromebook units and still have better battery life to boot.  

At the $149 price point.        

"With the launch of these devices, the Chrome OS ecosystem pulls side-by-side with the Windows world, where Microsoft reportedly hopes its OEMs will also offer $149 laptops based on Windows 10 soon."

(listen to those MS fanboys teeth jest a grinding while the rest of the developing world goes Chrome/Android from the very get-go)

The hockey stick guys are now into laptops and MS is getting all banged up and contused by being put inside an oriental style street hockey game while not wearing any protective body armor, for being fat and clumsy and not having a very long nor a very fast hockey stick.      Remember, half of MS's stick is kept up in the cloud at any given point in time, sometimes the head, sometimes the handle is simply gone, not there -- gone up into the cloud for storage.

Intel looks on aghast, speechless as their pet dog Rockchip fuels the fray, tearing up the rest of Intel's lock on the Chromebook market with gleeful abandon.

And there is NOTHING Intel or MS can do about it -- they have no competitive product to put forward, either of them.   And two huge players, Walmart and Amazon, are backing this game  --  so MS and Intel can't buy or bribe anybody to "make the bad man stop".    


The pain just goes on and and on and on .......


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cfhUxJ3jeo    MS plays 15 seconds of snow hockey with just a few of the new crowd of little Chinese hockey stick guys.

OK, MS is now stalling on all fronts until Win 10 is released -- there will be no new wave of Chromekillers until such time the cloud shared hard drive C:/  tech in Win 10 is released on new hardware and offered to the older Chromekillers as a usability fix.

This however, is not why Chromebooks aren't a super hot topic in America any more -- Chromebooks are still taking some market share in new areas like business, but in fact Chromebooks in general personal use have totally sold in and are sitting at saturation levels in the USA (people are upgrading to more powerful Chromebook units with larger screens actually).

What does this imply?   Does this mean Chromebooks are a natural 25% market share item, just hitting just at the 25% of folks with enough money to have multiple units?   The 25% who just want to cruise the web and never do much else at that location in their house?   Young people?

USA Education is indeed the largest sell in area so far, with the highest penetration % at around 40%-50% and growing.

Take a deep breath  and look at this chart -- it deals with a sell in that caps naturally in the USA and remains pretty much unchanged going forward --- it implies that Chromebooks may have indeed reached saturation here in the USA.




What does Win 10 mean to next year's Chromebook sales?    If MS does what they say they will do, I expect Chromebooks sales will take a dip during the sell in of "free" Win 10.   I also think the natural selection and price range effects will settle Chromebooks into the lower quartile of laptops as a whole.   But Chromebooks will command that lowest quartile pretty much uncontested (new chromekillers from MS notwithstanding).

I also think that Win 10 has been greatly influenced by the Chromewars, and that MS has made alterations in their Win 10 product to try to become "lighter acting" and to quit irritating users all the time with updates, etc.

Still, "lighter acting" isn't lighter and faster and it seems that Win 10 isn't significantly quicker in any real noticeable fashion.   The basic maintenance drill for Win  10 is pretty much unchanged, you still have to scrape your machine for viruses every week and do a defrag every couple of weeks or else your machine gets dodgy.

Microsoft's current Chromekillers have hit an acceptance wall due to hard drive constraints and general speed issues, and the Win 10 plans to hide part of the OS up in the cloud will not make the overall machines any quicker acting  (indeed it may slow them down yet more).

More and more folks are realizing that Chromebooks and Windows machines hit different need sets and are not really seen as head to head competitors by those that use both of them.

Chromebooks are useful and quick and light and trouble/irritation free devices that are WEB tools extraordinaire.   As web usage grows, so will Chromebooks.

But they will likely remain about at at the USA market share they have already captured, growing slowly as the basis for computer usage slowly rolls from individually loaded softwares to web apps.

Go back up and look at that chart again -- new emerging markets are indeed likely to have a higher adoption percentage than the USA, simply because MS isn't sitting there at a total Windows saturation point already like it was in the USA.

https://youtu.be/lHjNxscOY_M

Check this ad again -- see where Google is aiming their current Chromebook roll out efforts.

  (it ain't the USA by a long shot).

Brazil and Latin America and India and the Orient are the next big Chromebook markets

(and in total they are LARGER, rapidly growing markets right now than the economically stagnant USA)

"So what can we expect from the first Braswell chips? While we won’t be able to say much about their performance until we have a chance to actually test them, here are some of the specs:

Celeron N3000 – 1.04 GHz dual-core CPU with 1MB L2 cache, 4W TDP, and burst speeds up to 2.08 GHz
Celeron N3050 – 1.6 GHz dual-core CPU with 1MB L2 cache, 6W TDP, and burst speeds up to 2.16 GHznd yes, these Mediatek are fully integrated phone chips ......
Celeron N3150 – 1.6 GHz quad-core CPU with 2MB L2 cache, 6W TDP, and burst speeds up to 2.08 GHz
Pentium N3700 – 1.6 GHz quad-core CPU with 2MB L2 cache, 6W TDP, and burst speeds up to 2.4 GHz

All of these processors are 14nm chips with support for DDR3-1600 memory and the dual-core chips feature 320 MHz graphics with GPU burst speeds of 600 MHz. The Celeron N3150 processor has a 640 MHz GPU, while the Pentium N3700 has a 700 MHz GPU."


So, what will first gen 14nm Intel "tablet" chipsets be like?   They will be here starting shipping late next month or thereabouts, the very very very first of them anyway.

From all announcements, they are the same exact CPU chipset Intel has now, except die shrunk from 22 to 14nm.

They will use 15-20% less energy to give ~5% better performance.   THEY WILL HAVE better Intel graphics chips paired with them.   The new Intel graphics chipsets will eat up over half of the energy improvement gotten from the main chipset, so battery life may improve, but not as much as you might expect.

They will not be fully integrated chipsets, not yet.    Bonus bucks for extra motherboard components will be required still.

So, they will still require Intel contra revenue price supports to sell at Industry Appropriate price points.

Intel will use them until they have something better -- Skylake perhaps.   Or 10nm Cannonlake in a year or so.

Much of what happens to Intel next depends on Microsoft and Win 10 -- will MS continue to write Intel a reason to exist carved right into the OS itself, or will Win 10 be more of an even playing field?    

Wintel has a shot here at making something competitive, if they could cooperate together intelligently with their vendors.

Tegra X1 is shipping in bulk inside the same time frame, and Chromebook and Chromebox units are already under construction by at least 3 major vendors.

Tegra X1 is a large leap forward, and will likely outstrip the current Intel offerings by a respectable margin (even at 20nm lithography).  

Mediatek is a more immediate, stronger Chromezone low end threat to Intel as they have pre-existing A17 fully integrated chipsets that are clocked faster than the Rockchip A17s we just got in this week,  plus they have them in 4, 6 and 8 core variants with some A53's tossed into the mix for greater efficiency and improved battery life for normal web browsing uses.   Plus much stronger VR Graphics chipsets .....

     .... and yes, these Mediatek are fully integrated phone chips that all have HSPA+ built in right now so they could have GPS, bluetooth and cellular support too ......

So, a lot depends on just how many dollar bills Intel is willing to stack up on top of each Intel CPU and GPU set they plan to sell ....

And as the Chromewars conflict price point keeps dropping lower and lower, Intel and MS must pile up even more dollars to get their contenders all the way down to the new lower conflict price point.

http://www.androidauthority.com/galaxy-s6-first-place-antutu-q1-2015-598277/

Flip side -- is the 14nm Samsung Exynos Octa as good as it is knocked up to be?

Well, ya gotta go to the benchmarks to see what's cookin' with the new Samsung phone.   Samsung claimed 25% improvement over past efforts and the numbers yield a 28% improvement over Qualcomm's 810 processor (in real life testing by disinterested parties) so you got the right sort of numbers showing up in the right direction as IMPROVEMENT numbers.





Oddly enough, the Qualcomm 810 is the one that gets mentioned for getting hot and throttling itself, harming its overall phone performance ratings -- not the Samsung.

Now, to find any dirt on a Samsung phone, always ask the Appelonians.   Apple iPhone 6 fans tout all kinds of graphics speed wins for their home favorite, saying the iPhone 6 is faster graphically -- and this is true since the Samsung is pushing 130% more pixel density to just barely lose in these speed contests.

The Apple fans stand mute on screen resolution and color counts and spectrum this and that
(the very things they used to hoot about all the time).   But they will take their graphics speed wins since that is all they can find.

So, even the Appleonians have to agree that the performance increases in the current 14nm Samsung Exynos Octa are both real and significant -- and that strenuous abusive testing does not cause overheating and throttling on the Samsung chipset as it does with Intel's new Broadwell M chipsets.

Furthermore this is NOT the brand new groundbreaking Cortex A72 Samsung product that is coming out fairly soon which should carry even more kick ass improvements according to the ARM specs that product will be built with.

This is just a 14nm die shrink of existing A57/A53 big little technology ......   just like the current Broadwells are supposed to be a die shrink on Bay Trail when they finally get here, finally.

Intel, with a 2 year head start you fumbled around and let Samsung beat you to 14nm, and then you let Samsung beat you at 14nm performance-wise on top of that -- shame on you.

Samsung will tune this chipset for Tablets and have one out shortly -- then we can get Antutu ratings that show the relative position of Samsung's 14nm Exynos Octa against Intel's whole range of Tablet processors, including the 22nm big boys, the Core i3, i5 and i7 which are already out and counted in the MS Surface Pro units.

Now, won't that be fun ???        .... then the Tegra X1 will come out and kick Intel's butt yet again, for even more fun.