Smartphone Market Share

Smartphone Market Share
by Paul McLellan on 11-09-2012 at 12:47 pm

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

Apple and Samsung Take All the Profit
by Paul McLellan on 10-29-2012 at 4:07 pm

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


4 Billion CEVA powered Chips shipped

4 Billion CEVA powered Chips shipped
by Eric Esteve on 10-24-2012 at 8:34 pm

Why making the difference between chips and cores, when mentioning that CEVA’s customers have shipped four billion IC to date? Because that can make a big difference! Imagine for example an IP vendor selling processor IP cores to be used in massively parallel computing application, when the chip maker create a processor NxM matrix,… Read More


iPhone5 Versus Samsung S3: the Key Question

iPhone5 Versus Samsung S3: the Key Question
by Paul McLellan on 10-18-2012 at 8:29 am

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


Apple and The Road Ahead to Building an x86 Processor

Apple and The Road Ahead to Building an x86 Processor
by Ed McKernan on 10-15-2012 at 9:00 am


A small blurb last week announced that Apple had hired Jim Mergard away from Samsung after just 15 months on the job. Previously to that he was a 16-year AMD veteran who headed up their low power x86 Brazos processor team. In near synchronicity, AMD hired Famed Apple Designer Jim Keller to be its chief microprocessor architect. When… Read More


Dear Meg, HP is Still a Goner

Dear Meg, HP is Still a Goner
by Ed McKernan on 10-11-2012 at 9:30 pm


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


How Big is Mobile? Twice as many people use mobile phones than use a toothbrush

How Big is Mobile? Twice as many people use mobile phones than use a toothbrush
by Paul McLellan on 10-09-2012 at 3:47 pm

How big is mobile? Well, sometime early next year (or maybe even in the Christmas surge) there will be more mobile phones than people. Technically that is subscribers, so some of those “phones” are actually spare SIM-cards in international travelers’ pockets. But even so that is an incredible statistic. Also,… Read More


Samsung going vertical Qualcomm cry CEVA laugh

Samsung going vertical Qualcomm cry CEVA laugh
by Eric Esteve on 09-27-2012 at 11:09 am

These last days have been full of Apple related stories; maybe it’s time to discuss a new topic? Like for example Samsung, direct competitor for Apple in the smartphone market, and take a look at the company move toward more vertical integration. Everybody working in the SC industry knows that Samsung is ranked #2 behind Intel, even… Read More


Damn! Cramer Figured It Out

Damn! Cramer Figured It Out
by Ed McKernan on 09-20-2012 at 8:04 pm

As an investor, one has to always be aware when Jim Cramer informs the world of the investment scenario you have been playing comes out of the shadows and sees the light of day. Soon the herd will follow which is positive, but now one has to figure how long to ride the roller coaster. In an article posted on thestreet.com entitled “TechRead More


Cadence September News: strong IP and VIP focus

Cadence September News: strong IP and VIP focus
by Eric Esteve on 09-14-2012 at 4:25 am

There are three articles on the front page, in the September release of Cadence newsletter, all of them are dedicated to either IP (DDR4), VIP (NVM express VIP being used at Samsung) or Martin Lund. You can read Martin’s interview here and/or take a look at what I write about him this summer. This strong focus on IP, and in fact on Interface… Read More