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A Lack of Alternatives To Qualcomm Is Hurting the Ecosystem (androidauthority.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: Smartphone enthusiasts are probably eagerly awaiting the arrival of Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 835 SoC, which was unveiled back at the beginning of January. However, recent revelations suggest that consumers could be in for an unexpected wait, and we're unlikely to see an alternative manufacturer step in to fill the void given the current market conditions. The report claiming that LG G6 won't ship with the latest Snapdragon 835 flagship SoC is looking like bad luck for LG and a blow to consumers looking to spend their cash on the latest mobile technology. If true, this is also likely to have an impact on sales, as consumers hold out for better technology released in just a few months time. It's not only LG facing this prospect though, HTC, Sony, and all the other manufacturers that typically make announcements early in the year look to be facing a situation where they will be using the same processor as last year for early 2017 models. This scenario is unprecedented in modern Android history. The past few years have seen manufacturers kick start the year with flagship releases packing new processing technology. Unfortunately for these OEMs, there aren't any competing processors to use as a direct alternative to the delayed Snapdragon 835. The choice is then either to launch with an older technology or delay their product until the 835 is ready. While many will focus on performance stagnation, using the same chip also means that handsets are bound by the same feature sets, and so camera, video, virtual reality, and other capabilities won't be moving on either. Samsung's Exynos and HiSilicon's Kirin series are the closest SoCs to the 821 and 835 in terms of performance and features, but these are primarily reserved for their maker's own flagships and aren't rolled off the production line in anything close to enough numbers to meet global demand. This situation is a bit of a catch-22, with manufacturers unlikely to buy up expensive foundry lines without a strong indication that OEMs will use their products, while a lack of availability means major releases can't pick up these chips.
...fiddlesticks
Focus a bit on the software side for a change and let the next gen hardware be ready when it's ready.
If you want to break Qualcomm. Shut off CDMA. Any manufacturer can make a GSM Phone. CDMA is Patent controlled by QualComm.The issue is; alot of USians that are on CDMA Networks, don't know they are on CDMA Networks.
I don't have much sympathy for this current state of affairs. Consumers voted with their dollars, Qualcomm delivered, and firms that integrate Qualcomm products into their flagship devices developed no fall-back. With such a piece of technology fraught with so many singe points of failure, it was just a matter of time before the ecosystem collapsed.
I'm interested to see what the latest lawsuit against Qualcomm will do for the ecosystem, too.
The vast majority of people are just looking at the brand name, interface, memory and user-facing features when shipping at a phone. If they spare any thought at all for the CPU, it's just a vague sense of satisfaction that the CPU running at a faster clock speed or has more cores than their current phone.
If the new phones are released with the same CPU as the current generation, nobody will give a shit and the people who were going to buy them will still buy them.
Where is the IBM PC of the mobile world? When will enterprising developers be able to program these mobile computers with as much freedom as they had during the burgeoning era of personal computers?
The ecosystem is hurting, because it is being denied the process of evolution by variation and selection; walled gardens, government-granted monopolies, government-induced backdoors, etc., are all leading to a stagnant wasteland of mediocre, purposely broken solutions to problems that nobody has, and a lack of solutions for the problems that people actually do have.
or more accurately, unrealistic expectations. Or marketing.
Qualcomm announced the 835 when? LG announced the G6 when?
Did anyone believe that LG would be able ship the G6 a month after the chipset was announced...?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
your phone will still work. Stop trying to make Qualcomm out as the single factor with which the whole smartphone market stands and falls with. Their products are replacable.
So the App designers can invent new and creative ways to phone home with my datas
Rick B.
OH NO! It's not a matter of some phone fetishists finding themselves unable to mention a different processor name in a phone that has plenty of raw performance anyway. Noooo. It the whole darn ecosystem that's endangered. It's a terrible shame as I really like baby seals, pandas and whales etc.
Please stop with the fake news designed to support a political position and unrelated lawsuits. The lack of competitive alternative CPUs to run Android has little to do with Qualcomm's tactics in the CDMA chipset market and everything to do with Google being too lazy to support Android on diverse SoCs.
If Google had really supported Android on Intel's Atom SoC then competition would have spurred faster improvements in both SoCs and Intel likely wouldn't have exited that market last year.
Think of the shame of it! Buying a brand new 'flagship' phone, only to realise it's got an old processor in it, used in the previous model. You never know for sure it's not even a pre-owned processor, and no one buying a £700 phone wants anything pre-owned about it. That CPU might have been extracted from some chav's phone and used to send instagram pictures of his willy to his chewing-gum consuming girlfriend.
Is it just me, or is this some 'not-news'? Buy a phone that does what you want it to, not one which has an entirely different parts list than the last one. This implies that mobile CPUs are now at something of a plateau, and so in fact, any number of manufacturers could enter the market to make cheap, commodity processors without fear of 'progress' eating too much of their R&D spend.
Since the same processors/chipsets will be used for longer, will this mean that phones will also get updates for longer?
The only network that really _needs_ to include CDMA is Verizon's (since they are the go-to carrier if you need connectivity in the boonies.) All the other urban carrier guys can get away with using GSM.
There have been many other competitors to Qualcomm in the Cell-Phone chip space. (Mediatek, Intel, Broadcom, Reneasys, Etc...) The OEMs only used these competitors as pricing pressure on Qualcomm, and didn't actually develop products with a second-source strategy. Surprise, Surprise... Many of the other competitors have stopped making chips for phones, due to the high cost and low volume. Now the OEMs complain they don't have options to compete with Qualcomm. Hmmm... Wonder how that happened.
I could give a fuck about phone manufacturer's problems updating their fall fashion lines. It's ridiculous these things come out so frequently, cost so much, and lose software support so soon.
That's not the only ridiculous thing about them. They also crash a lot, feed people's ADD, destroy privacy by making government tracking ubiquitous and by enforcing a bargain of true and thorough personal data traded for app access, catch on fire and explode, and encourage obnoxious behaviour like slow-walking, pushy-walking, bad table manners, overuse of the flashlight, and social media oversharing.
But the particular thing on display here is the low value/cost ratio caused by the semimandatory yearly upgrade cycle, and the ridiculous fashion-world character of the marketplace where people are in a panic if they don't have something fresh by November.
Can't get yo new electro-candy-bar pad're ? Slow-bit gotcha upsit? Gotta boo-hoo over a lack for knack attaining the most recent boolian buffunian cuff-link set? Girlfriend won't fuck-ya till she sees the $600 charge on yo MasterBlaster ?? You po po piece-of-consumer-shit. Betcha voted for master-gator Hillarious. Take a walk in lib.comz Central Park to ease yo SJW ennui; get raped.
your own 7nm fab. Good luck to you. It's a free market. All you need is $10 billion to play. You can raise it on Kickstarter. It's no big deal.
Well, cell phones have a lot of complicated, and proprietary, silicon. There is no totally open, standard architecture, unlike the PC Compatible, which intel has spent a lot of engineering on working out the details over the years. Sure, most cell phones use ARM processors, but there are sorts of little details, which are not specified, like the bootup sequence. Architecture books are sold by intel to the general public, for a small fee. Also, PCs are good enough for computer stuff, so why work hard on constantly changing cell phone chips?
LTE is standardized, but 'closed source' to the general public, unlike wifi. On the topic of LTE, the cell phone companies care a lot about what software, and hardware, they allow on their networks. Especially since nontechnical users care a lot about the reliability of their network. Good luck to Verizon explaining that some recent double e, wanted to play around with their cell phone, and it ruins reception for everyone on the block.
In order to root your phone, you often have to rely on undocumented or poorly documented features which may disappear at the whim of a proprietary manufacturer, or you have to download some shady proprietary hack (ironically, a binary blob in its own right) from some shady website, and simply trust that it's handing you (and only you) more control over the device—this sort of rooting depends absolutely on exploiting flaws in the design of the software, and thus cannot be considered a reliable method.
Besides, the GPU is often locked up as well, and that's 80% of the fun of computing. Sometimes, even the WiFi chips require special, proprietary setup.
Also, the baseband tends to be hooked into all manner of subsystems, and in some cases can be seen as a proprietary backdoor into the whole device.
Huge upfront costs that only keep rising with each new advance in die shrinkage, products with very short life cycles and no rewards for second place. And even when you're successful the per unit margins are nothing like in software so you have monopolization. This isn't news. The number of chipmakers keeps falling and will probably still keep falling. Be happy you're American and have Qualcomm. We Russians only have Mikron and are stuck at 65nm which commercially is a dead end.
Why doesn't Samsung do more with its Exynos processor and become a much bigger competitor to Qualcomm?
This time, it's Samsung's lack of 10nm manufacturing availability that's constraining who can get the 835 and any competing chips. There's no way for any other company including Qualcomm to compete with a chip built with the previous generation 14nm process. It's a "law of physics" thing.
That doesn't mean that Qualcomm isn't using its FRAND patents to muscle competitors out of the market. It just means that the lack of availability of the 835 chps are because of lack of 10nm manufacturing capability.... if Qualcomm had their way, they'd *love* to be able to supply 835's to anybody who wanted them.
We are still very limited in our choices of phones because of carrier dominance. If you want a subsidized phone, you need to buy Samsung or Apple. If you bring your own phone purchased at $500+, you're surely in the minority. If you buy one of the many Chinese phones, which are available well less than $100 (I've picked up quite a few at $50 or so), they won't work on carriers other than ATT, and we all know how badly ATT sucks as a carrier. [Wow, my capcha for this posting is "incest."]
Good God, a true ranting Messiah! "Government Baaaad, Free Markets Gooood!"
The lawsuit of which you speak, I don't know WTH you are talking about and I don't care to know. It's irrelevant.
The government is solely to blame for monopolistic practices, huh? And the communication's industry is completely blameless? They don't give money and lobby, and pressure, and threaten? Only the government is responsible though?
Also, you have utterly failed to make the connection between the "communication's industry" and Qualcomm. But then, that gets in the way of your anti-government rant, so we can't have that, right? I suspect that the "government" doesn't give a rat's patootie about Qualcomm, but you got in your shots against the evil government, so have at it!