Qualcomm has delivered its financial report for Q4 2012, and things are looking pretty good across the board. Revenues in Q4 settled at $4.87 billion, which is up 18% year-over-year and 5% sequentially. That certainly isn't bad, but the company's operating income was stagnant year-over-year and actually down 11% sequentially, coming in at $1.24 billion.
AMD has revealed the latest in its FX Series of processors: the Piledriver Vishera chips. Aimed at computer users with demanding hardware needs, the new series comes in 4, 6, and 8-core variants with a "default" speed of 4GHz. The chips feature a variety of enhancements and improvements over previous offerings.
Last year, AMD announced that it would cut 10% of its workers by the end of 2012's first quarter. Now, 11 months later, it seems Advanced Micro Devices is about to announce a workforce reduction of up to 30%. This news comes after AMD's annoucement on Monday that it expected sales to decrease approximately 10% from the last quarter.
Another day, another financial result. This time it’s AMD's turn, although the company is only offering up preliminary numbers until the actual results go out on July 19th. Things aren’t looking so good for the chip maker, with AMD predicting an 11% drop in revenue from last quarter. The company had previously thought that revenue would increase by 3%, but has had to adjust its expectations.
Qualcomm has revealed that it is developing a new LTE chip that can support seven frequency bands, which would mean that future LTE devices equipped with the chip can be used on Verizon, AT&T, and Clearwire 4G. This eliminates the need for manufacturing different versions of a mobile device and solves the interoperability problem of LTE carriers in the US.
This morning the folks at NVIDIA have announced their first trip into the world of AT&T 4G LTE with the Icera 410 LTE mulimode data modem chipset for tablets and clamshell devices. This chipset paves the way for NVIDIA to be working on the 4G LTE network AT&T offers in the very near future and through the future as well with Tegra-powered devices galore. The qualification tests this chipset has just gone through will allow product manufacturers from all corners of the market to quickly and easily get set up with 4G LTE and will set NVIDIA up for big wins in the connected AT&T smart device market for some time to come.
Slides were released during Intel's annual Investor Meeting that revealed an ambitious roadmap for the chip maker. Intel plans to shrink its chip fabrication process down to a mere 5nm, with a 10nm process set to release in 2015 and work having already begun for the 7nm and 5nm processes. The company's latest Ivy Bridge chips are 22nm and the next iteration for 2013 will jump down to 14nm.
This week there's a bit more action on the Samsung side of things as the electronics giant hires several AMD server specialists. These hires likely point toward a new focus in Samsung's processor focus, with former AMD vice president and until-Friday general manager of their server chip business Patrick Patla being Samsung's latest hire. Recruits to Samsung over the past year include several AMD titans from across the gamut, with chips for servers appearing to be the next aim of Samsung's SoC business.
Intel has launched its Xeon E5-2600 server chips, which are designed to tackle web-based cloud computing. This market is estimated to have an annual growth of 33 percent through 2015 thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, for accessing the internet or otherwise requiring internet connectivity for cloud-based services.
Intel showed off its mobile chip roadmap today at MWC 2012, featuring an ambitious plan that Intel CEO Paul Otellini believes will "light a fire under" Apple, Samsung, and LG. For this year, the company has set 32nm architecture chips with its Medfield Atom Z2460 processors. (Make sure to check out our hands-on with the Intel Orange "Santa Clara" Medfield phone). But next year, it's shrinking its chips down to a new 22nm process and then further to 14nm by 2014.
If you've been holding out for Intel's next-gen Ivy Bridge-equipped computers thinking they'll be on their way in April, you'll be disappointed to know that manufacturing issues are now pushing back the schedule to sometime in June. This 8 to 10 week delay was revealed by Intel's executive VP and Intel China chairman, Sean Maloney, during an interview today with the Financial Times.
Among several new mobile chips we'll be seeing at Mobile World Congress next week, will be Samsung's new Exynos chips. The company teased the first samples at the ISSCC event this week and is expected to showcase two of these next-gen processors at MWC. Although one of the models still uses quad ARM Cortex-A9s, it's built on an improved 32nm process, which should mean both faster speed and longer battery life.
