From mainframes to minicomputers and then personal computers, each new computing generation has displaced its predecessor by reaching a broader audience and costing far less. And each time, the dominant company in one generation loses control in the next.
That is why the PC industry’s commanding chip maker, Intel, might do well to be alarmed by the computer chips being designed by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cell phones.
An engineer at Qualcomm’s gleaming corporate campus here demonstrated a palm-size circuit board capable of displaying high-definition video. What was striking about the demonstration was not the quality of the video images, which is now common. Rather it was that the microprocessor chip, called Snapdragon, drives the display with less than half the power of a similar chip recently introduced by Intel. Qualcomm designers say it will also cost less.
As the PC shrinks in size, it is on a collision course with the multifunction cell phone. Many expect the resulting effect to transform both devices and all the companies that make them. The new smartphones, always-on portable Internet devices that are part cell phone, part computer, change the rules of the game in computing because computing speed — at which Intel excels — is no longer the most important factor. For a cell phone relying on a small battery, how efficiently a chip uses power becomes more important.
The new mobile world represents a special challenge for Intel, which until four years ago ignored the issue of increasing power consumption in its flagship X86 chips, which have been the PC industry standard for almost 30 years.
Other chip makers have not ignored power consumption. Just last month at Computex, an electronics trade show in Taiwan, the Silicon Valley graphics chip maker Nvidia demonstrated a small mobile computer that worked five times as long…
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