MWC is once again the venue for the global persuasion campaign between competing visions of the O-RAN project. The big swing factor this time around is the growing presence of hyperscalers, notably Microsoft Azure.
Did Aliens Build the Pyramids? – Did Ali really build its own CPU? It looks like they got help from a few outside parties which just shows that designing chips, especially CPUs, is still hard.
Is the Cloud Your Friend? – The big cloud service providers are buying up the world’s communications infrastructure and they are funding those purchases by the enormous profits they make on their core services. Hard to see this trend going on indefinitely
Recent analyst studies show that “Content Providers” are steadily taking control of the global communications infrastructure. This will have profound impacts on many industries, and the changes are still in early days.
What are they thinking? – Google used its burgeoning chip design capabilities to create an apps processor phones. It is likely to have some incredible AI features, but it is unlikely to see much adoption or to change the industry.
2021 State of the Mobile Baseband – Apple’s share gains, its leading Apps Processor, and growing pricing pressure for Android phones risks creating a vicious cycle for Qualcomm.
Roll Your Own Chips – When you design products that someone else is going to manufacture using processes that trip against quantum physics effects, no one is cool enough to not be a little worried that something will go wrong.
Let’s Build a Chip – We lay out the costs of building a chip – with spreadsheets!
Google BigChip? – Google has its own semis design tool, called Taffel, this speaks to larger ambitions in rolling their own chips, but if they ever pen sourced them it could spark a lot of change in how we design chips.
Pretty much everyone. We have been doing a lot of work lately on in-house silicon, most recently with our post on Google’s VCU. And it got us thinking about who […]