Texas Instruments: Screw smartphones, put our chips in the dishwasher Apple and Samsung are squeezing smaller chip manufacturers out of the market by only using their own chips, said a VP at chipmakers Texas Instruments. Greg Delagi senior vice president for embedded processing at Texas Instruments announced that his company was winding down its investment in smartphone and tab chips, and …
If you'll excuse the pun. Apple and Samsung, following their most recent bout, are going to be even more paranoid about their patents and anything they haven't produced themselves is a potential patent lawsuit waiting to happen. The whole smartphone market is toxic at the moment and now seems like a good time to get the hell out. Or at the very least, until a more sensible method of dealing with patents and disputes is brought in.
The housewives' choice (in the days we had houswives) would have been music while they worked.
Better then the single choice of noise coming out of the kitchen if and when the little woman does any work in such a place these days. I'm surprised nobody has thought of doing something like that before. Today, the average cook of either sex has abilities that struggle to reach average, a video/cooker might improve things.
At the very least they might incorporate a cookbook.
Hell it might even make going to the laundrette interesting in a sad life style way.
Hang on! When were TI ever more than an also-ran in sexy devices like smartphones/tablets?
If it had been Qualcomm or NVidia reporting being squeezed by Apple and Samsung, that would be a story! And it would speak of a changing field: one which a player like Intel might (try to) enter on equal terms.
But AFAICS it wasn't, and it doesn't.
Too right. And device integration and reducing chip count has been the name of the game ever since people started putting together electronic equipment.
And that's why IP players like ARM do so well, and "fabless manufacturers" like Wolfson have done so badly, and indeed the whole SoC theme is part of this, with the big player building more and more functionality into fewer and fewer chips.
Worth noting the effort that Intel is now putting in to try and enter this field. Threatened by Windows RT, and the probable further fragmentation (and possibly decline) of what we knew as the PC market, they have put increasing amounts of effort into low power and mobile processing, as evidenced by recent Intel based phone launches. They don't yet match the best, but Intel has noticed how ARM sell (the IP for) well over ten billion chips a year, compared to Intel's 300m microprocessors. Margins differ, but the growth rate for mobile devices is phenomenal, as is the growth in the capabilities of mobile processors, and Intel know there may not be a PC market (as we now recognise it) in ten years.
If TI think that embedded devices is going to be an easy win, they are mistaken - Intel are intent on making sure they don';t get left behind again, and the existing mobile device players have already given thought to what else can use their chips, so TI will find themselves as welcome in dishwashers as they are in mobile phones.
Perhaps the story should have been "Texas Instruments announce strategy to fade away".
The current race for faster chips and the focus on graphics makes it hard for TI to compete. Their top line chips being the OMAP4 has been struggling to keep up the pace and has been losing design wins to the quad cores of Nvidia and Qualcomm in the independent market. Their latest chips have been in the low cost segment made up by Kindle, Nook and Tab2s from Samsung. The last of these really says something because it means TI are having to sell their chips so cheaply that it is cheaper for Samsung to use the 4470 than their own and TI isn't making much money that way.
Part of it may be that TI lacks a quad core Cortex-A9 and that hampers performance but it's clear that the margins are starting to be cut razor thin as smartphone SOCs make like PCs and race toward commodity status. Of course that may eventually come back to bite ARM as the other players shave pennies from their profits and the royalty to ARM start becoming a bigger slice allowing a competitor to enter, did someone say Intel, MIPS? It might be good for TI to pivot early and focus their R&D dollars on other markets. Perhaps the next great breakthroughs will be smarthome or automotive infotainment or something not even realized yet. It isn't like the world will be using fewer processors and micros in the coming years after all. Companies like Xilinx aren't exactly hurting because they're not selling smartphone SOCs so there is no reason TI can't do the same if they find a nice niche.
You'd have thought TI would have learned from the calculator wars or from when Commodore dropped the price of the VIC20, thus forcing TI out of the home computer market.
It's the same old problem as back then, vertical integration. Meaning anyone specialising in just flogging chips it out of the market.
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