SOC Diversity

[rumpleforeskin]

I paid little attention to the recent dominance of qualcomm in the android phone space until recently, given the reported overheat/throttling issues with the 808/810 I started looking into alternatives and there seems to be little competition in the SOC market.

The earliest smartphones I owned were usually run on SOC by Texas Instruments though I can find no recent product by them in ARM based smartphones. Mediatek are still going but it seems only a popular choice in budget phones aimed at the non western market.

The Big players left putting out competitive hardware are only including it in there own devices (Samsung/Apple) which looks to have left the likes of HTC, Oneplus, LG, Sony, Motorola and others with little to choose from for their current generation of mid to high end devices.

I was very pleased to see the Zenfone 2 sporting an Intel processor which looks like a strong offering in the Android space, though in the zenfone it appears to be married to a battery hungry screen which somewhat dampens my desire for the device.

nVidia were also making waves recently in the ARM space though in the tablet market.

It seems unless you are buying a flagship apple or samsung device you would be better served hanging on to your current device a little longer and missing this generation.

 

[poofyhairguy]

It seems unless you are buying a flagship apple or samsung device you would be better served hanging on to your current device a little longer and missing this generation.

At least wait until the fall. The 820 should be out by then with another custom core from Qualcomm which should fix the issues with the 810.

Another option is Huawei, as they have their own SoC.

And honestly it is good this year happened. We moved to an almost Qualcomm monopoly because carriers got lazy and only wanted to approve Qualcomm SoCs on their network (that is why the Zen isn't sold through say AT&T). The 810 disaster will force the handset makers to push for more diversity in their suppliers (maybe dragging someone like Mediatek or Rockchip into the high-end) and it will force the Verizons of the world to accept the fact that they need to get off of their asses and approve some different chipsets to work on their network. This whole thing has been obvious for a while now by anyone paying attention, and in the long run will just be a hiccup on the path to a stronger Android device ecosystem.

 

[Commodus]

The funny thing is that Qualcomm's increasing dominance is partly why Apple, Huawei and Samsung all design their own processors. It's not just to stand out -- it's to avoid being chained to the fate of a particular vendor when it's not really necessary. You have to feel sorry for the companies that just aren't large enough to create their own chips, since they get screwed if there's a delay or something goes wrong.

 

[Mopetar]

The earliest smartphones I owned were usually run on SOC by Texas Instruments though I can find no recent product by them in ARM based smartphones. Mediatek are still going but it seems only a popular choice in budget phones aimed at the non western market.

TI got out of the game several years ago so its no surprise you haven't been able to find anything from them. They had some reasonably good chips, but decided to get out of the SoC business entirely for whatever reason.

Qualcomm was one of the first companies that started integrating the cellular baseband into their SoCs which made it easier for manufacturers as it cut down on the number of parts. They also were typically either the top or near top in terms of performance with their chips as well which made them an easy buy.

NVidia basically stopped caring about the phone market entirely as they've been focusing their Tegra line towards tablets or just trying to hit impressive performance numbers that are complete overkill for a phone and blow past the thermal budget entirely. I think they also gave up on trying to make their own baseband as well which is just another mark against the Tegra being used in a phone.

MediaTek doesn't really target the high-end of the market so you don't hear much about them as they tend not to show up in flagship devices and they don't add much of their own special sauce to the design in the way that Qualcomm or Apple do heavy customization of the architecture, but they do have some interesting products. They're actually making a chip (it hasn't come out yet, but they've talked about it) that takes the big.LITTLE idea to another level where they have three different clusters as part of the chip with a low-clock quad-core portion, another quad-core cluster with a moderate clock speed, and then a dual-core Cortex-A72 with a higher clock still. I have no idea how that will actually work out, but it's an interesting idea.

I suppose you could say that Intel is also in the business as they've been trying to get x86 into the phone space for a while now, but haven't gained all that much traction. You really have to go out of your way to find a device that uses their chips. The ASUS Zenfone 2 is the only thing I can think of offhand, but I recall some Lenovo phone using an Intel SoC as well.

There are a few Chinese companies making chips, but those are almost entirely for the Chinese market. There are also companies that make their own SoCs like Samsung, Apple, and Huawei, but they don't sell them to other handset manufacturers so the only way to get one is to buy a phone made by that company.

Compared to the x86 space, there's actually a lot of diversity, but just not a lot at the high-end in the western market and the smaller players currently don't have a lot of incentive to target that market segment either.

 

[soccerballtux]

equal opportunity SoC BGA machine