soc

Qualcomm it is for Windows Phone as ST-Ericsson fizzles away

Windows Phone News

By Daniel Rubino, Monday, Mar 18, 2013 at 1:16 pm

Turning to other matters today, it looks like the silicon maker ST-Ericsson will soon be a thing of the past, or at least significantly de-fanged. The company is now set to be broken up with employee layoffs and the remaining legacy continuing as STMicro.

This is relevant only because back in 2011, ST-Ericsson publicly claimed a deal with Nokia to help supply their chipsets on their emerging line of low-cost Windows Phones. Indeed, their NovaThor chipset was supposed to rival that of Qualcomm, who has had a dominant role with Windows Phones from its inception.

Nvidia Tegra chipsets finally coming for Windows Phone in 2013?

By Daniel Rubino, Sunday, Sep 11, 2011 at 10:55 pm

For some reason, everyone is planning for 2013. Guess we should start picking out our clothes now as Nvidia evidently has plans for Windows Phone, three years after knocking it and the same year that Samsung is reportedly dropping the OS.

Nividia's Tegra chipsets have been around for awhile now, heck they even powered the ZuneHD. But besides some Android handsets, they have been absent from the Windows Phone side, leaving plenty of room for mega SoC maker Qualcomm to ride high.

In a leaked roadmap from Heise.de, we can see that in 2013 Nvidia is looking to power Windows Phone handsets using their Tegra/Icera combo "Grey" chipset. Reportedly featuring a 28mm manufacturing process and 2G/3G/4G communication capabilities (something Nvidia is missing now), the chipset looks to be as powerful as Qulcomm's offering but with some Nvidia GPU oomph.

We're still trying to make sense of the layout of this slide, but it is interesting to see Windows and Windows Phone lumped next to each other--reaffirming the notion that both OSs will become closer together, especially as Windows 8 moves to ARM processors.

Source: Heise.de; via: Fudzilla; Thanks, @darkhorse166, for the tip!