Qualcomm COO Dr. Sanjay Jha Interview at GigaOM

So far, we have been talking about Intel vs AMD. But maybe it is time to call this battle outmoded as Intel is joining the mobile device arena. And who is it going to meet there? Qualcomm of course!

Unlike other succesful corporations, Qualcomm has kept a lower profile and has since 1985 worked systematically to a dominant position with mobile manufacturers. Now Intel’s Atom will probably force it to come out of its relatively low profile stance.

COO Dr. Sanjay Jha was interviewed by Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM. Here is the things that I found important and I would like to comment on:

Intel pushes with Atom and MID for “Internet in your pocket”

Intel MID devices in CES 2008 were only mockups to give us an idea of size. In three months, Intel has progressed dramatically. The device segment between mobile phones/smartphones and laptops is the next cash heaven for device and chip manufacturers and Intel wants to be strong in this market as soon as possible. Atom processors and the MID concept are the names around which Intel wants to build a strong presence.

Today Intel announced some Atom spec for the first time. It is the smallest CPU in the company’s history with a power consumption a scale of magnitude lower than the 35W typical of today’s best laptop processors. Of course that fact does not guarantee anything, as for the time being Atom handles data but no voice. And since consumers want voice and data in one small mobile package, it is probably a matter of time before this is offered as well. For this reason, analysts estimate that Atom chips will be in a truly competitive position by 2009 or 2010.

NVIDIA responsible for almost one third of Vista crashes!

Source: ars technica 

Poor Microsoft. You have been hammered by almost everyone about the instability of Windows Vista. But what can you do when the largest GPU supplier writes low quality driver software that causes the whole OS to crash?

NVIDIA’s G80 architecture caused many problems throughout 2007 and the pie chart above -based on Microsoft data- confirms that NVIDIA drivers were the major cause of crashes. Not that others are as good as we would expect, with heavies like Intel and ATI causing their big share of the problems.

Intel leaving OLPC program

Intel announced yesterday Thursday it is pulling out of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The OLPC project is the creation of MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte and has passed several hurdles to arrive at the critical point of being able to realistically serve children of developing markets.

The first major problem was that the projected price of $100 per child was not possible to achieve and since October it has become $200 through a donor program.

When is the market dominated by a single player?

This post is a direct result of recent rumours in several blogs that state that Intel’s Penryn chips might appear later in the market than originally projected because AMD currently has a very weak product line and is not a threat even for Intel’s current CPU models! Of course Intel has the last word in this, but even the rumour is enough to make me think that there are cases when users do not receive the freshest technology developments as they become available at company R&D departments. For this to happen, the particular company must be the absolute leader in its market, the undisputed number one. Here is some examples:

• Intel obviously. It dominates computer CPUs for ages now.
• Canon in photographic cameras.
• Microsoft in operating systems.
• Apple in portable music devices and music downloads.

So apart from market share how do you judge that a company is in such a strong position?