The numbers for smartphone sales in Q3 are starting to roll in. These are in units and not yet revenue (let alone profit) numbers although everyone down to Sony is for sure profitable. Samsung is running away with the volume, selling more than Apple, Huawei and Sony put together. One name that is missing is Motorola (Google) which … Read More
Apple and Samsung Take All the Profit
I’ve talked before about how Apple and Samsung make most of the money in the handset business (and also about how Nokia…er…doesn’t). Now there is a report from Canaccord Genuity makes it clear just how much of the profit they make: 106%. And that is down from second quarter when they made 108%.
How can they… Read More
Apple v. Samsung: Mixed Phone Marriages End in Divorce?
A funny thing happened at dinner the other night. The SemiWiki blog “8 Things I Hate about My iPhone5” caused quite a discussion. Half the table had Samsung phones and the other half iPhones. It really was more of a religious or political debate versus a rational consumer electronic discussion. An interesting side note, it seems … Read More
Google Datacenter
In my blog about Intel’s latest results I linked to an interesting article in Wired about Google’s datacenters.
I happened to be browsing some websites in the Netherlands (actually I don’t speak a word of Dutch, a Dutch friend pointed it out to me) and there is an article showing how the pictures that accompany… Read More
Why Blog on SemiWiki.com?
The Semiconductor Wiki Project, the premier semiconductor collaboration site, is a growing online community of professionals involved with the semiconductor design and manufacturing ecosystem. Since going online January 1st, 2011 more than 400,000 unique visitors have landed at www.SemiWiki.com viewing more than 3M pages… Read More
A Brief History of Mobile: Generations 3 and 4
The early first generation analog standards all used a technique known as Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA). All this means is that each call was assigned its own frequency band in the radio spectrum. Since each band was only allocated to one phone, there was no interference between different calls. When a call finished… Read More
iPhone5 Versus Samsung S3: the Key Question
In all the discussion about iPhone versus Samsung, the profit leader and the volume leader in the handset business, there is way too much discussion about boring stuff like how many MIPS the A6 chips has and whether the maps are any good on iPhone (no) and is there enough 28nm capacity for Qualcomm. Boring.
The real question that everyone… Read More
A brief History of Mobile: Generations 1 and 2
Mobile is one of the biggest markets for semiconductor, especially if you count not just mobile handsets but also the base-station infrastructure. No technology has ever been adopted so fast and so completely. There are approximately the same number of mobile phone accounts as there are people in the world. A few people have more… Read More
Dear Meg, HP is Still a Goner
A year ago, Meg Whitman decided it was time to venture back into the business world by grabbing onto the HP CEO baton from a badly wounded Leo Apotheker. What for? My best guess is to enter the Pantheon of Great Turnaround CEOs of failing companies, best exemplified by the work of Lou Gerstner with IBM in the early 1990s. It comes too late… Read More
A Brief History of Moore’s Law
I recently read a news article where the author referred to Moore’s Law as a ‘Law of Science discovered by an Intel engineer’. Readers of SemiWiki would call that Dilbertesque. Gordon Moore was Director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1965 when he published his now-famous paper on integrated electronic… Read More


PDF Solutions Charts a Course for the Future at Its User Conference and Analyst Day