The Exciting Competition of Mobile Chipsets

While watching the Grizzlies vs Spurs game tonight, I was surprised to see the Qualcomm Snapdragon sponsorship and commercial (see below for the video). Also fun to see geeky chipsets get comsumer marketing.

The competition of mobile chipsets is exciting and fierce. Many large companies are fighting it out to become the chipset leader for mobile smartphones and tablets. The competition is to provide the most powerful, most capable, lowest cost, and lowest power consuming chipset.

Chipsets are either vertically integrated into devices (e.g. Apple makes the chipset for its own phone) or sold to other device manufacturers (e.g. Snapdragon, OMAP, and Tegra are sold to device manufactures like Motorola, HTC, LG, Sony, Asus, and more).

For our GPU software company, it is especially exciting that each of these devices contains a mobile GPU capable of supplementing the mobile CPU to deliver even greater performance to mobile apps. Our software makes that acceleration boost possible (demos).

For decades now, the processor competition has largely been AMD vs Intel for CPUs and NVIDIA vs ATI for GPUs. The rise of mobile computing brings with it a number of new players that are developing very powerful processor technologies.

Here is a snapshot of the current mobile chipset competitive landscape:

Company	Chipset	CPU	GPU
Qualcomm	Snapdragon	ARM	Adreno
Texas Instruments	OMAP	ARM	PowerVR
NVIDIA	Tegra	ARM	GeForce
Samsung	Exynos	ARM	ARM Mali
Apple	A#	ARM	PowerVR
ST Ericsson	NovaThor	ARM	ARM Mali
Intel	Atom chipset	Atom processor	PowerVR (phone) Integrated (tablet)

What chipset is in your phone? Do you pay attention to the chipset competition?

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