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Amazon Considering Buying Texas Instrument's Chip Business
puddingebola writes "From the article, "Amazon is reportedly in 'advanced negotiations' to acquire Texas Instruments' OMAP chip division, bringing chip design for its Kindle tablets in-house, and helping TI refocus on embedded systems. The deal in discussion, Calcalist reports, follows TI's public distancing from its own phone and tablet chip business in the face of rising competition from Qualcomm, Samsung, and others, though Amazon taking charge of OMAP could leave rivals Barnes & Noble in a tricky situation.'"
This is a big move for Amazon, especially considering their Kindle doesn't necessarily demand huge amounts of performance, especially not in comparison to the iPad and other high-end Android tablets. I never really thought they would go this way, but now I can't help but wonder if they're going to expand toward phones as well. It seems that they could have just as easily sourced chips from Qualcomm unless they had something huge planned.
Not just B&N. A lot of cheap Android tablets use TI.
Amazon taking charge of OMAP could leave rivals Barnes & Noble in a tricky situation
Also, I believe the BeagleBoard is the SoC OMAP3530 ... not to mention there's a bunch of Samsung products (since it was mentioned that they are "rising competition") that depend on the OMAP4xxx series like the Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 2 and Galaxy Nexus ... lot of BlackBerry devices on that list too. It's not just the Kindle Fire using OMAP4, there's a lot of current devices using OMAP3 & OMAP4.
What's going to happen to all these devices when Amazon decides it doesn't make open source hobby boards or cell phones and condenses these SoCs down to just Kindle-related focus? I guess it'd be stupid to throw away all that business but anybody know what would happen to these?
My work here is dung.
Call me ignorant, but since when is Amazon a company that develops hardware?
I know Amazon has a big catalog, but customized / re-branded products aside, aren't they basically a box-moving company? What the *** are they doing in the chip development business? More specifically: what do they expect to do, that a specialist like TI can't do for them?
OMAP is only one small part of TI's integrated circuit business.
That said, I'd really prefer if they kept it. I really like what TI has been doing with OMAP lately. I'm afraid Amazon might ruin it for the rest of us.
All it would do is place Amazon in a postion to actually fufill their orders for parts for the Nooks (Successors in interest typically get stuck with deals in progress unless there's clauses that cause the contract to go "poof" in them...).
We won't get into B&N doing a mass purchase (That would have to be filled) for an EOL for all intents and purposes against the OMAPs they already have designs for- and then start buying from one of the Chinese, Taiwanese, or Korean suppliers of ARM SoC's that're roughly comparable. TI just gave them better deals at the time they went with the parts in question.
With Amazon's tablet being so much more tightly controlled than most Android devices, it should be much easier for Amazon to change architectures, and just force in-house and other developers to ensure their apps (if native, rather than the 90%+ that are Dalvik) are recompiled and working on the new CPU from day one.
As we saw with the first $100 ICS tablet out of China, MIPS chips can be cheaper while still performing just as well, particularly with China spending good amounts of money to keep developing their Dragon / Loong Soon chip, giving it out-of-order execution, multiple cores, and better performance per-clock (where MIPS has always been ahead of ARM) and giving it away to domestic producers.
So, of all Android tablet producers, why doesn't Amazon try jumping ship to a different CPU?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Amazon taking charge of OMAP could leave rivals Barnes & Noble in a tricky situation.
Apple just announced that it's going into the chip business. Why not Microsoft too?
The new Barnes & Noble subsidiary, which will build on the history of innovation in digital reading technologies from both companies, has not been named and will be referred to as Newco.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Microsoft-Invests-300M-in-Barnes-and-Noble-Settles-Patent-Flap-555788/
I doubt that this will be good for other TI users, either---not just B&N.
Ugh - I don't like Amazon as a company. They're annoying and wedge themselves into my view all the time and I want them to go away.
TI on the other hand.... I really like TI chips and support. I've worked with a number of chip vendors, and they're my favorite when it comes to developer support, Linux support and SDKs.
Plus, I think of Amazon as a "sell materialistic people a bunch of useless junk" company, whereas TI is all into signal processing, military, heath care, and all kinds of actual useful things.
I really don't want this to happen.
Are they selling Kindles or books?
Right now they seem to be laboring under the delusion that they're a Kindle company. They've deliberately crippled the Android version of the Kindle software; for instance, you can't categorize books into collections, which is a Big Deal if you're a serious reader and have dozens or hundreds of books. There's no technical reason for the omission, it's just market segmentation.
I can't imagine they (currently) make more profit on the Kindle than they do selling their books, music, et al, so I can't see a rational reason for this strategy.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The BN nook uses this processor. Sounds like an attempt at freezing out the competition.
This is the Web 2.0 version of AOL buying Time-Warner.
whereas books arn't (if you're under 25). And if you live in the fantasyland that a lot of these dot.com CEOs do and believe that skinny jeaned hipsters with disposable cash will be your core market in the future (they won't , they'll have moved on to the next must have male handbag substitute long before) then you'll go for the flash products every time at the expense of your the business that actually makes you money now.
Bigger question is - will they maintain a separate fork from the 2.2/2.3 they are using?
Or will they move to Jelly Bean (without the pieces they don't like obviously), and continue to maintain their own stuff separately?
This may make things more interesting.
Its not like you need to train on an ereader first before you buy a tablet. They're a fad , nothing more. In 10 years they'll be just another long forgotten footnote in tech history.
No one seems to have mentioned it yet, but it's worth pointing out that Amazon is presumably buying just the OMAP processor *design* unit, not the manufacturing unit. They will likely still use TI's foundries to make the parts, but Amazon will have control over the architecture and who gets the documentation.
Also worth reinforcing that this is not a bad deal for TI. ARM CPUs are pretty much a commodity product at this point, without much room for differentiation unless you go hog wild with optimizations like Qualcomm has. TI's main business has always been in the low-level ASIC and microcontroller markets, where is has a very large, well-respected variety of parts and continues to improve them.
I know Amazon says they don't make any money on the hardware, which probably sucks for them, but a Kindle fire goes for about $ 150 US so there really isn't that much to be made on each sale, even if production costs go down 30% you are only making 45$ per unit. Now if you control the manufacturing, edge out competition like B&N's nook you could release a Kindle 2 at 300$ and still be far cheaper than an IPad and make a good chunk off hardware costs.
Good for Amazon shareholders? Sure would be! Good for consumers? Nope!
The way the line wrapped on my phone, I thought the headline read, "Amazon considering buying Texas.". Maybe I need a kindle so I can have longerlines on my screen.
Silence is a state of mime.
I really wish someone would come out with a dual core arm SoC with e-sata and gigabit ethernet as a light duty server. 1BG of ram would be nice but 512MB would probably work too. Guruplug, some of the allwinner media boxes and BYO drives NAS boxes come close but each miss something or cost too much. Single core is weak for rar / par and can get bogged down (yea, yea scheduler, blah blah). USB can't set HD parameters, has material cpu overhead and is wonky for RAID. 100/10 is a bit weak throughput for even a SOHO server.
OMAP5 with the right configuration would get there. Please stop putting 100/10 interfaces on these chips @&#$%!
I'm ok paying for a light-duty gpu and hdmi display interface but e-sata and gigabit pls, pls ,pls.
Considering how gimped the Kindle series is (it excludes the entirety of the Google ecosystem), adding more horsepower would be akin to putting lipstick on a pig. As such, I have no idea what Amazon hopes to accomplish with this acquisition, and don't expect much from it.
I think it won't happen as the article describes.
TI "spin off" the OMAP and make the Sitara and the DaVinci families ("almost" same features as OMAP) that are used by several "non-mobile" applications. Many people depend on those and I am sure that they need to keep producing and developing for many more years.
Also, OMAP is a SoC that has TI proprietary devices used by other markets, like for example the DSP, and I am sure they are not selling those either.
I think the best deal for Amazon would be to make a partnership and design an exclusive "custom" OMAP (please rename) for their needs and don't sell /that/ to B&N.
I thought oh, Amazon is buying Texas. That should help with the sales tax issue :-)
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Just out of curiosity who still uses woot since Amazon bought them? Show of hands? Anybody? Class? Anybody?
Yeah thought so.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Amazon is, what Apple pretends to be.
Admittedly my two cents are coming from an AC so it's worth its weight in bytes, but...
This has to be one of the most insightful things I have seen posted on slashdot in oh.. at least six years.
Pity it's gonna get glossed over instead of recognized for its cleverness.
Anyone here remember when TI was *the* powerhouse of chip development/fabrication? Anyone remember when the *only* name in radio was Motorola.. ( no, RCA doesnt count )
Now look at what we have, moto is owned by a damned search engine, and soon TI by a book company...
WTF is going on in this world?
---- Booth was a patriot ----